..BiniitMit'.^^iMKIimMliailUtmniUiMiyUliMHMHlmi-. 



OF OUR COLL 



CLARENCE -F - BIEa>SEYE - 




Class j^J-aTG 

Book ^ " Iq ^ .. 

(k)i}yright}J^_ . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE REORGANIZATION 
OF OUR COLLEGES 



THE REORGANIZATION 
OF OUR COLLEGES 



BY 



CLARENCE F. BIRDSEYE 

AUTHOR OF 
"INDIVIDUAL TRAINING IN OUR COLLEGES" 



New York 
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 
. 1909 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 
MAK 22 1^09 

^ Copyriiicnt Entry 
CLASS CC XXc. No. 



K^ 



^ 



G 



Copyright, 1909, by 
CLARENCE F. BIRDSEYE 



Published, February, 1909 



THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK, U. S. A. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PART I 

Shall We Reorganize Our Colleges? 

PAGE 

Chap. I. From What Standpoint Shall We Consider Re- 
organization? 3 

Chap. II. Do the Colleges Need Reorganization? . . 12 

Chap. III. What Shall Be the Objectives of the Reorgan- 
ized College and of Its Course? . . 14 

Chap. IV. Of What Departments Does the College Consist? 21 

PART II 

The Student Life Department 

Chap. V. The College Now a Quasi Public Corporation — 

Not a School Based Upon the Home . . 35 
Chap. VI. The Relation of the College to the Common- 
wealth 51 

Chap. VII. The Student Life Department and the College 

Community Life 6r 

Chap. VIII. The College Community Life — Contintied . . 75 

Chap. IX. The College Home Life 90 

Chap. X. The Greek-Letter Fraternities and the College 

Home 96 

Chap. XI. The College Home and College Vices . . .118 
Chap. XII. The Dominant Position of the Student Life De- 
partment 146 

PART III 

The Separate Administrative Department 

Chap. XIII. The Science of Administration and the Func- 
tions of the Administrative Department . 165 
Chap. XIV- Administration, Discipline and Order in the 

' Earlier Colleges 181 



vi Table of Contents 

PAGE 

Chap. XV. How Shall We Reorganize the College? The 

New Primary Unit 185 

Chap. XVI. The Nature of Business Administration and 

Administrative Departments . . . 200 

Chap. XVII. Bookkeeping and Accounting in the Reorgan- 
ized College 215 

Chap. XVIII. The Use of Blank Forms in the Reorganized 

College 223 

Chap. XIX. Study and Care of Its Plant by the Reorgan- 
ized College — The College Inventory . 235 

Chap. XX. How the Reorganized College Will Study Its 

Field 240 

Chap. XXI. The Marking System in the Reorganized 

College . . . . . . . . 245 

Chap. XXII. Studying the College Waste Heap . . 258 
Chap. XXIII. Examinations in the Reorganized College . 266 
Chap. XXIV. Discipline in the Reorganized College . .270 
Chap. XXV. The Waiting List in the Reorganized College 275 
Chap. XXVI. Advertising and the Publicity Bureau in the 

Reorganized College 280 

Chap. XXVII. Standardization and Uniformity in the Re- 
organized College 289 

Chap. XXVIII. Some Final Suggestions as to the Adminis- 
trative Department 297 

Chap. XXIX. The Relation of Administration to the Stu- 
dent Life in the Reorganized College . 307 
Chap. XXX. The President in the Reorganized College . 313 



PART IV 

Summing Up 

Chap. XXXI. The Motto and Ideal of the Reorganized 

College 325 

Chap. XXXII. Resume. The Keynote of the Reorganized 

College 331 

Chap. XXXIII. Can We Have a New Form of American 

College and University? .... 367 

Appendix 375 



PREFACE 

Many years ago an eminent physician said to me: 
"The medical profession know substantially nothing 
about diphtheria, and can save but a small percentage 
of the stricken. Like other physicians, I am treating 
the disease empirically, experimenting first with one 
remedy and then with another, hoping that eventually 
something will be found which will reduce the terrible 
fatality. I prescribe the latest proposed remedy, not 
knowing whether it will meet the case — ^for we are grop- 
ing in the dark." 

Recently another physician said to me: "We dread 
diphtheria less than almost any other disease if treated 
in time; for since it has been found to be a germ disease, 
and its antitoxin prepared, the things which were for- 
merly inexplicable have become perfectly plain." 

During the past seven years, as I have studied college 
problems from the standpoint of undergraduates in 
whom I was personally interested, I have been con- 
stantly and forcibly impressed with the close resem- 
blance which the present attitude of college educa- 
tors and authorities as to their problems bears to the 
former attitude of physicians as to diphtheria. I have 
found, also, that the fatalities of the college course have 
been great, and often inexplicable, and, to my mind, 
inexcusable; for those fatalities have been largely 



viii Preface 

mental and moral, in institutions from which such re- 
sults should not be expected. Meanwhile the college 
treatment has been strictly empirical, the educators 
have been "groping in the dark," experimenting upon 
the characters and futures of splendid young men, and 
prescribing first one remedy and then another, hoping 
that something would be found to reduce the fatality; 
and attempting thus to meet conditions which they had 
never correctly diagnosed and hence did not under- 
stand. From the beginning I have felt that there must 
be some reasonable and sufficient explanation for the 
entire change in college conditions and results; for the 
remarkable growth of fraternities, intercollegiate ath- 
letics and other things which did not complicate and 
upset the earlier college, but which have played havoc in 
recent years; and that when these things were under- 
stood a remedy would also be found. Hence I have 
been trying to discover and indicate the nature of the 
trouble and its location in the college body, and to sug- 
gest a general method of treatment — an antitoxin — 
capable of effecting a cure if taken in time and in the 
right way. 

Those who prepared the diphtheria antitoxin did 
not thereby become the only ones who could cure 
the disease. They merely made plain how physicians 
should treat their cases. In like manner, if we can 
locate the causes of the college trouble and point out 
the general treatment, it will not be necessary to show 
earnest, thoughtful and learned educators just how they 
must apply the remedy in cases arising under their 
own peculiar surroundings. As never before, our col- 



Preface ix 

leges to-day possess a wealth of endowment, and 
teaching ability, and earnestness, and loyalty and self- 
sacrifice. Yet all these have proved largely impotent 
and even self-destructive, because the colleges have 
been "groping in the dark"; but can be made efifective 
if the colleges can be taught how to locate and diagnose 
their troubles. 

The college course, like diphtheria, must continue 
to claim some victims, and largely because they are not 
"treated in time"; but we may hope greatly to decrease 
the fatality and improve general results if we can stop 
the "groping in the dark" and the experimenting, and 
walk with certain step through evils which we do not 
fear, since we thoroughly understand them and their 
nature. 

Clarence F. Birdseye. 

New York, February i, 1909. 



PART I 

SHALL WE REORGANIZE OUR 
COLLEGES? 



THE REORGANIZATION OF OUR 
COLLEGES 

CHAPTER I 

FROM WHAT STANDPOINT SHALL WE CONSmER 
REORGANIZATION ? 

Not long ago a candid and thoughtful professor in 
one of our smaller colleges, after a discussion of some 
of the crudities of the present college administration as 
they appear to a business man, asked: *'If you had the 
opportunity to reorganize our colleges, upon what plan 
would you proceed?" 

This simple question presented an old subject in an 
entirely new light, and the answer was instant: "Along 
the lines of the best modern corporate reorganizations; 
with the same objects, by the same methods, and avail- 
ing ourselves of similar human agencies, but all adapted 
to college conditions." For a quarter of a century we 
have been familiar with business and corporate re- 
organizations. The law governing them is well under- 
stood, and the great profession of the certified public 
accountant, at first based upon the experience of the 
English chartered accountants, has largely grown out 
of the reorganizations and consolidations which have 
included more than ninety per cent of our railroad 
mileage and substantially all our great trusts and 

3 



4 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

business and manufacturing concerns. Furthermore, 
these reorganizations and consolidations have been 
largely, especially as to their legal features, under the 
charge of college men who have been familiar with 
every detail. 

If, then, our colleges can be reorganized upon sub- 
stantially the lines with which we are conversant in 
business and corporate affairs, we shall have two de- 
cided advantages: first, we can make use of well-estab- 
lished principles which have been worked out at infinite 
cost of time and money by our great captains of in- 
dustry — ^whose thinking and doing run side by side — 
and by the lawyers, accountants and business assistants 
whom they have called to their aid; and, second, since 
many of the leaders of this great army of skilled re- 
organizers are college men, and hence more or less 
experts in college affairs, their services can be made as 
directly available in the affairs of Alma Mater as in 
those of a railroad or business corporation. Moreover, 
almost every large institution of higher learning has 
upon its board of trustees the chief of some great and 
well-organized business concern. If these men can be 
made to appreciate that their own college needs their 
aid in reorganizing her affairs along the very lines with 
which they are familiar in their own business, at least 
we shall have found competent and sympathetic ex- 
perts and advisers acquainted alike with local con- 
ditions and with modern business methods. 

This book, then, is intended to lift college reorganiza- 
tions to the plane of the best with which we are familiar 
in the business world; for often college ideals and re- 



The Standpoint of Reorganization 5 

suits are far below the best business practice and 
results. The former are frequently crude, incomplete 
and unsatisfactory, while the latter are increasingly 
systematic and scientific. But if we are to follow busi- 
ness methods we must thoroughly analyze our subject 
to make sure that there is a necessity for reorganization ; 
that there are important and permanent objects to be 
gained thereby; that there are causes responsible for 
present conditions which can be removed; and that 
there are methods which have proved sufficient in other 
fields to solve similar problems arising from substantially 
the same causes and agencies and applicable, with proper 
modifications, to college affairs. 

To understand how such methods can be applied in 
our colleges, we must analyze business conditions and 
processes so that we may comprehend their results in 
other fields and judge of their applicability in the 
college field. 

In "Individual Training in Our Colleges" I at- 
tempted to show the history, content and purposes of 
our older colleges, and the evils and shortcomings of our 
present institutions and their lack of system and fore- 
sight — all from the standpoint of the undergraduate, 
who is either the victim of this lack of system or the 
victor notwithstanding it; or, as a distinguished United 
States senator once said: "I love my Alma Mater for 
all that she has enabled me to be and to do in spite of 
her." Much of the earlier book is germane to the 
present discussion, but repetition will be avoided with 
care, and reference made only when absolutely necessary. 

Many matters herein considered are applicable 



6 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

chiefly to the undergraduates of the college proper, and 
not to those who are in the graduate schools, although 
it is not always easy to draw the line; for the distinction 
between our colleges and universities, never very clear, 
becomes constantly more and more complicated in fact, 
when judged from the standpoint of the undergraduate. 
On the one hand we find one Southern university, so 
called, advertising that it "prepares young men and 
women for college," and on the other we discover that 
even the Association of American Universities has no 
very definite notion of what should qualify an institu- 
tion to become a member of the Association. At first 
it "made the existence of a strong graduate department 
the sole condition of membership." But the report of 
its Committee on Membership made in 1907 recom- 
mends that professional courses shall be preceded by at 
least one year of college work.^ 

Yet only eighteen institutions have been found eligible 
for membership upon a not too strict enforcement of 
such easy qualifications — leaving at least 175 more of 
our so-called universities which cannot yet comply with 
the conditions for membership thus laid down. In 
other words, in this matter there is but little in the name. 
We must frankly admit that with us the words " college" 
and "university" have no fixed and definite meaning 
and can convey no exact notion of the content or cur- 
riculum of any institution of whose official name they 
form a part. 

"As was pointed out in the Second Annual Report of the 
President of the Foundation, the words 'college' and 'uni- 

1 See Appendix No. I. 



The Standpoint oj Reorganization 7 

versity ' have no well settled meaning in America, nor is the 
sphere of higher education by any means carefully defined. 
As a result the degree-giving institutions in these countries 
present every variety of educational and administrative 
complexity. Even the well-informed educator is apt to 
speak of our colleges and universities as if they formed a 
homogeneous species conforming more or less clearly to 
some typical condition. Not only is this not the fact, but 
these institutions do not even fall into any definite number 
of such species. There is no method of classification which, 
when applied to the thousand American and Canadian de- 
gree-conferring institutions, will enable the student to divide 
them into clear species. Whatever criterion is chosen will 
result in placing some institutions in company to which they 
are not entitled to belong." ' 

The illustrations of the valuelessness of any ordinary 
methods of comparison are given at length in the 
Bulletin. For these see Appendix No, II. The eco- 
nomic losses arising from this lack of uniformity, and 
the lessons to be drawn from it, will be considered in 
Chapter XXVI, where I shall have occasion to refer to 
the adverse influence of this uncertainty upon all edu- 
cational interests. It is sufficient at this time to point 
out how this lack of uniformity complicates the prob- 
lems of the reorganizer. At least eighty per cent of 
our students are in institutions with more or less of 
graduate courses — institutions which are already uni- 
versities or are putting on the university garb, as they 
understand it. Moreover, in the university there is a 
constant tendency to shift the center of the academic 
community from the arts faculty (college) to the pro- 
fessional or graduate schools, and we must have a plan 

' Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Bulle- 
tin No. Two, p. I. 



8 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

of reorganization flexible enough to cover such con- 
stantly changing conditions. For example, within 
twelve years the proportion of college students of the 
University of Michigan has altered from about fifty per 
cent of the whole to about thirty-five per cent. 

The subject is further complicated by the fact that 
the state universities are growing relatively much faster 
than the private institutions, which have long been and 
still are the standards by which too many persons, 
especially at the East, judge all our institutions of 
higher learning. 

Shortly before his death, President W. R. Harper, of 
Chicago University, expressed it as his opinion that " no 
matter how liberally the private institution might be 
endowed, the heritage of the future, at least in the West, 
is to be the state university." 

The following comparison shows how rapid is this 
gain of the state universities: 

1896-7 1906-7 Increase 

Attendance at 15 State universities 16,414 34,770 112% 

Attendance at 15 representative Eastern col- 
leges and universities i8i33i 28,631 56% 

Increase of attendance during same period 
in representative private institutions in the 
Middle West ' 58% 

But these figures may be misleading. The dean of 
an important Western university writes: 

" In large part this increase is due to the new lines of 
work. The state university is becoming more and more a 
department store, to which new counters are added as often 
as anyone suggests an attractive line to offer. Compared 
to the Eastern institutions, within equivalent courses, I 
doubt if there has been as great increase in numbers. Cer- 
1 President MacLean, of Iowa State University, before Presidents' 
Meeting, October 31, 1907. 



The Standpoint of Reorganization 9 

tainly the great increase in the Middle West private institu- 
tions has been due in good part to the addition of music 
schools, special courses, etc. The old time work, or culture 
courses, have grown in the state universities and the Western 
private institutions far less than is believed." 

Furthermore, the rapid growth and improvement of 
the public high school and the development of the 
technical schools add other elements of complication. 
At the same time our colleges are often trying to vie in 
scientific equipment with the state universities and the 
technical schools. 

Because of these and other variances, it is quite im- 
possible to draw a clear distinction between the college 
and the university so far as relates to the conditions 
which surround each student. Therefore I shall use 
the word "college" in its generic sense, as applying to 
those students who are getting their higher education 
under conditions and surroundings which are essen- 
tially comprehended within the term "college life," as 
distinguished from those men who are pursuing a pro- 
fessional or technical course divorced from anything 
like true college conditions or surroundings. In this 
large sense the surroundings of the graduate and pro- 
fessional students living and working in a college town 
and in or around a campus may approximate more 
nearly to college conditions than do those of the under- 
graduates of an urban college which has no campus, 
or well-organized athletics, or other student activities 
which tend to weld the student body into a sympathetic 
and homogeneous mass. Hence the word "college" 
will be used to apply to those students, no matter what 
their course, who are living more or less under college 



lo The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

conditions and surroundings, as those words are 
familiarly used; and the words "college" and "uni- 
versity" will often be used interchangeably. 

These very great differences between our institutions 
of higher learning have several constant and important 
bearings upon any proposed reorganization. 

First. There can be no safe generalizations based 
upon our present knowledge of prevalent conditions. 
The isolated and unconnected reports upon the student 
situation which have been made by various institutions 
are largely worthless for scientific use, because the 
underlying conditions of the particular institution are 
not clearly set forth so that we can judge of their real 
applicability to other institutions, or even to that insti- 
tution at some other period. In other words, we have 
no scientific and reliable data comprehensive enough to 
cover the widely varying conditions of which we have 
just spoken. For this reason any reorganization must 
be largely tentative, halting and incomplete, for it must, 
in considerable part, be founded upon its own investi- 
gations and statistics to be made in the future. To be 
of scientific rather than of local value, these investiga- 
tions must be made hereafter along the same lines and 
at the same time in widely scattered institutions, so 
that the local and underlying elements may be taken 
into account in the final generalizations. 

Second. Not only are there many kinds of institu- 
tions, but there are as many grades of excellence in 
each kind. Some are doing splendid work in their own 
line, and others are equally weak or even vicious; and 
there are all degrees between these extremes. Some 



The Standpoint of Reorganization ii 

colleges are strong in one set of influences which tend 
to turn out well-rounded graduates, and at the same 
time lamentably lacking in others. Hence the reor- 
ganizer must make a careful study of local elements of 
weakness and strength before he can safely proceed 
far with his plans. 

Third. As will be more fully shown hereafter, these mat- 
ters are largely outside of the realm of pure pedagogy. 

Fourth. Not all the things complained of in this 
book are true of any one institution, although they are 
in part true of almost all. Yet it does not follow that 
because they are not true in one institution or class of 
institutions they are not true in others. Nor does it fol- 
low that because an institution is not affected by one set 
of evils it may not be grossly wanting in other respects. 

For this very reason the use of names will usually be 
avoided. Otherwise grave injustice might be done to 
some splendid institution by calling attention to a fault 
which it happens to illustrate, while failing to give it 
credit for its many excellencies. Moreover, it does not 
follow that any conditions, good, bad or indifferent, are 
permanent in any particular college. Nothing is more 
striking than this constant local change within a com- 
paratively short period. Hence a thorough knowledge 
of the conditions which prevailed a few years ago may 
be of very little value in determining the present situ- 
ation. Above all, let us beware how we judge of 
prevalent conditions by those which we knew even in 
the recent past, or of the general situation by that 
which exists in our own Alma Mater as we think that 
we know it. 



CHAPTER II 

DO THE COLLEGES NEED REORGANIZATION? 

No evidence as to the necessity of a radical reorgani- 
zation of our colleges is required, for it is a basic rule 
of law that no proof need be given as to that which is 
admitted or not denied. 

Our college authorities, without exception, admit the 
need of some reorganization, especially in other insti- 
tutions than their own. As individuals they may differ 
as to details, but they agree that something is very 
wrong. But the men who have come closest to the life 
of the students, and have pondered most carefully upon 
student problems, admit at once the truth of the arraign- 
ment of college shortcomings, and then, with startling 
earnestness, point out further evils and suggest new 
lines of thought to which attention had not previously 
been drawn. Before we finish we shall find plenty of 
evidence to prove that a reorganization is imperative. 

But if there be such a need of reorganization, then 
the failure, long ago, to grapple with the evils which 
must every day be adversely affecting the lives of the 
best of the rising generation, and to analyze them 
thoroughly, and force a solution of them, is one of the 
terrible crimes of the nineteenth century. 

This need of reorganization is as well recognized 
abroad as it is here. The London Times, in an edi- 
torial in April, 1907, said: 



Is Reorganization Needed? 13 

" The two ancient universities are once again on trial and 
cannot escape the obligation of putting their house in order. 
They will be given reasonable time for self-examination and 
self-reform. Failing in this, there will be an exhaustive 
inquiry and drastic compulsion from without." 

We need not search far for the chief reasons why 
college conditions are unsatisfactory and a reorganiza- 
tion is desirable. We readily understand that no great 
business can be successful where not more than one of 
its five or six chief constituent departments is properly 
conducted, where another is theoretically but not 
actually successful, and where the others are misunder- 
stood and neglected. It makes no difference how well 
the manufacturing department is run, if there are n; 
proper shipping, sales or credit bureaus; nor how good 
an operating force a railroad may have, if its repair or 
auditing or financial bureaus are not sharply differen- 
tiated and properly managed". Yet this is the mistake 
which the colleges are making; and their unaccountable 
failure to organize and coordinate all of their great de- 
partments and to make each do its full duty is the chief 
reason why they need a reorganization. No one of 
their departments can do its best work if the others are 
not doing their full share to make the whole institution 
do its great duty. 

The colleges must continue to be inherently weak so 
long as they do not provide for a proper and complete 
correlation and coordination of all their activities and 
forces, whether financial, pedagogical, administrative, 
executive, or relating to the personal lives of the students. 



CHAPTER III 

WHAT SHALL BE THE OBJECTIVES OF THE REORGANIZED 
COLLEGE AND OF ITS COURSE? 

Before we can proceed far we must agree upon the 
objects that we are to hold steadily in view, and for 
which, if necessary, we are to sacrifice old-fashioned 
methods and ways, and every unimportant notion, no 
matter how well intrenched, which will hinder us in a 
satisfactory reorganization. 

Let us agree, then, if we can, that the objectives of 
the college course, as distinguished from the objects of 
the institution, are: 

(i) The individual training of the students, to make 
them, as nearly as may be, clean, cultured, forceful and 
resourceful solvers of the problems which will arise in 
their relations (a) to the state and to their fellows in 
the community, (b) to their own families and those 
otherwise personally dependent upon them, and (c) to 
their own higher moral, religious, intellectual and phys- 
ical natures. In other words, the college course is 
primarily to enable the young student to find himself 
and to train him for efficient citizenship in the broadest 
sense of the word; and not primarily for scholarship, 
or athletics or social polish. To be sure, every ado- 
lescent who comes under Alma Mater's fostering care 

14 



The Objectives oj the Reorganized College 15 

needs, in a varying degree, to be trained in scholarship, 
physical efficiency and manly graces, but the college 
course should stand first of all for making each student 
an all-around and forceful member of the community 
in his future years. 

(2) Not for present stuffing, but for training the in- 
dividual so that he shall acquire the habit, power and 
desire to grow and develop, mentally and morally, what- 
ever his future surroundings may be. 

(3) To cast aside mere studying for a diploma, or 
rank, or marks, or any other temporary or counterfeit 
aims, and, even if the student be but going into busi- 
ness, to build for studious and scientific training and 
character. 

(4) And hence to train in the broadest way for the 
all-around man, for the mens sana in sano corpore, and 
not be content with a physique which, because of neg- 
lect on the one hand or of overtraining or overstraining 
on the other, cannot meet the demands of modern con- 
ditions and competitions. 

These great objects and purposes must be molded 
into the very grain and essence of each institution, so 
that they shall be a vital part of the college atmosphere 
which each student must breathe. No influence is un- 
important which can hinder or help these great objec- 
tives, and every such influence must be studied, and, if 
necessary, dealt with by a separate department thor- 
oughly equipped for that very purpose. 

Our colleges are but a part of the great social and 
economic structure of the nation and community and 
governed largely by the same rules and principles, which 



1 6 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

therefore must be strictly studied and wisely followed 
if the colleges would attain to their highest usefulness. 
Hence the colleges owe it as a first duty to their students 
to work out their own economic, sociological and do- 
mestic problems, quite as much as to study these sub- 
jects only as they relate to the submerged tenth or some 
other portion of the general community. 

These objectives of the college course, that is, as to 
the college results, are not essentially different from those 
governing a well-organized factory or business estab- 
lishment. Although in the eyes of the public they may 
not stand upon so high a moral plane as the colleges, 
there are many business corporations which in fact get 
better results and more honest work and have higher 
ethical and moral standards for the individual than 
many colleges; and the difference in results arises from 
the difference in administrative methods and ideals. 
Some of the ways in which our college administration 
falls fatally behind that of an ordinary business corpo- 
ration will be pointed out in succeeding chapters, with 
suggestions as to changes to be instituted in the colleges 
in those regards. 

We must never allow ourselves to mistake a college 
diploma for a true college education, or a college degree 
for college training. As we proceed I shall use the 
words "college education" and "college training" in 
the broad sense of an education and training for citizen- 
ship, and as comprehending, therefore, those elements 
of scholarliness, culture, physical strength and prowess, 
and pleasing manners, which must be added to the 
character of each student in order to make him in 



The Objectives 0} the Reorganized College 17 

future years strong, efficient, cultured and clean to the 
top of his bent. We shall see that it is just this de- 
velopment, nothing less, which the college owes to 
everyone to whom she gives her diploma. 

Surely we can all agree that it is only by keeping 
these objectives as to the college course clearly before 
us that we can hope to make the most, mentally, 
morally, physically and individually, of the student 
material which enters the doors of the college, or to turn 
out such material developed to the highest degree to 
make the best use of its powers in its future work in life. 

A clear exposition of what the university or college 
itself should stand for is found in the report submitted 
on February i, 1908, to the faculty of Columbia Col- 
lege by Dr. James H. Canfield, after a three months' 
trip to examine personally the methods of teaching and 
of discipline (intellectual and other) which are in use 
in the upper classes or forms of typical English public 
schools, of English grammar schools and of French 
Lyc^es; and in the first and possibly the second year of 
residence in colleges and universities of both England 
and France — in other words, corresponding in the 
main with the freshman and sophomore years in our 
colleges : 

"All modern educational ideals center in a movement 
which seeks more complete and efficient employment of all 
human gifts and powers, all natural forces and all material 
resources, in behalf of national advancement and well-being; 
by which, of course, is meant the advancement and well- 
being of every person within the nation. It is an educational 
ideal which makes for peace, prosperity, and true renown; 
which believes that the greatness of a state can always be 



1 8 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

more accurately measured by the greatness of its teachers 
than by the number of its regiments, by its scholars rather 
than by its squadrons. Education which does not recog- 
nize this movement and has not this end in view, which does 
not distinctly accept this as its supreme motive, is neither 
public nor large nor sound nor enduring. Every educational 
undertaking, from kindergarten to most advanced research, 
will be tried under this law, and will be approved only as 
it meets this standard. The world seems to have finally 
determined that it has little or no time or strength to spend 
on mere abstractions; it demands that very definite and 
helpful relations shall be discovered and maintained in all 
forms of human life and endeavor. 

"Prince Metternich wisely said, 'All reforms begin at 
the top.' The university, then, must be the leader in this 
great undertaking. Leadership is its right and its duty, 
its privilege and its opportunity. To forfeit this for any 
reason whatever is simply to fall from grace, to substitute 
weakness for strength, to cease to give an adequate reason 
for existence. . . . Every university must set itself the task 
of satisfying three classes of demands and aspirations: 
those of the nation, the people at large; those of the students 
who attach themselves to the institution, and in a certain 
sense those of all who hope to have the advantages of higher 
education; and those of its officers. These are given in 
what is believed to be their order of importance, though it is 
not easy to create this distinction. But the general welfare 
certainly stands first, though so indissolubly linked with in- 
dividual welfare that the two can scarcely be considered 
apart. The students are given precedence of the officers, 
because it is mainly for the purpose of their education that 
colleges are maintained, their time is short, they have but 
one chance for preparation for active life, and they are the 
coming generation; while the officers as a body either hold 
the center of the stage or have already begun to retire slowly 
toward the exits. The true university is not merely a place 
where a lad may get an education, but is a seat of wisdom and 
learning. To this wisdom and learning, willing to serve 
(which is the first condition of all leadership) the nation 
turns with a demand for leadership. . . . The students 



The Objectives oj the Reorganized College 19 

need, and very generally desire, effective instruction and 
stimulating companionship, and reasonable preparation for 
life. They cannot receive the first unless their instructors 
of every grade possess remarkable strength of character, 
unusual mental equipment, careful and thorough prepara- 
tion, unceasing industry, unflagging zeal, alert and com- 
pelling consciences, large unselfishness and active sympa- 
thy. Whole men and wholesome men, men who are sane 
and strong, men who are broadly informed as well as pos- 
sessing advanced special training, men who are carrying 
some share of the public burden, men who are making 
themselves and their work felt in the world about them; 
these are the true Masters of Arts, no matter what other 
degree they may carry. . . . The needs and demands of 
worthy officers constitute the third form of drain upon the 
resources and strength of the university corporation. What 
these men ask is opportunity to discover truth and oppor- 
tunity to impart it. The first means equipment of every 
kind: books, apparatus, laboratories, assistants — and a fair 
amount of time for the proper and effective use of these. 
The second means a well-arranged curriculum, within which 
a student can move with considerable freedom of choice, thus 
bringing together the largest possible number of both teach- 
ers and taught; with the further provision that, by that form 
of organization which will throw the least possible burden 
of administration upon officers of instruction, idle, ignorant, 
unworthy students may be either quickly reformed or as 
quickly withdrawn from troublesome and impeding contact 
with the true life of the university." 

In other words, our colleges and universities should 
keep their own ideals high and should turn out clean, 
strong problem solvers, thereby recognizing and ful- 
filling their duties to the state, to their founders, to their 
own officers and to their students. Anything short of 
this is failure. I shall go further and show that the 
college, even the private college, is now a distinct agent 
of the commonwealth and as such has direct duties to 



20 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

perform for the state. But throughout our discussion 
let us keep in mind the distinction between the objects 
of the college and those of its course, between the in- 
stitution and the individuals who for the time adminis- 
ter its affairs or give or receive its benefits. 



CHAPTER IV 

OF WHAT DEPARTMENTS DOES THE COLLEGE 
CONSIST? 

We must next consider whether all the forces and de- 
partments of the colleges have heretofore been properly 
differentiated, studied and organized, and whether each 
and all are doing their full part to effectuate the objects 
of the institution and of its course. 

For practical purposes the college activities may be 
roughly divided into six great departments or classes : (a) 
finances, (b) instruction or pedagogy, (c) administra- 
tion, (d) the executive, (e) the trustees or board of con- 
trol, under whatever name, and (/) the student life, or 
that portion (about ninety per cent) of the undergradu- 
ates' time not spent in recitations, lectures or other per- 
sonal contact with their instructors. The student life 
must be further subdivided into the college community 
life and the college home or family life. 

(a) The financial department is often smoothly run 
by experts who are not pedagogues, and is out of sight and 
therefore out of mind, except in the treasurer's annual 
report. It will not require much attention in this dis- 
cussion. Its chief lesson to us is that it is the only de- 
partment whose cleavage from the others is sharp and 
distinct. It is successful largely because no other de- 
partment feels warranted to interfere in its affairs. Its 



22 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

duties and limitations are well defined and respected, 
and its results, if it is on a real business basis, are cor- 
respondingly satisfactory. 

There should be no difficulty in having a perfect 
financial system in any college if the finances are under 
the charge of a well-trained business man. The book- 
keeping problems are, up to the present time, of the 
simplest nature, mere cash accounts with no cost ac- 
counting or other intricate questions. Hence it is 
nothing to boast of if the books are well kept, and it 
is something to be ashamed of if they are not so kept. 
Some institutions have placed their bookkeeping in the 
hands of skilled accountants, who turn out model 
annual reports, showing full trial balances, balance 
sheets, detailed statements of receipts, disbursements 
and investments, and have frequent audits of accounts 
and verification of cash and securities. In such in- 
stances, at least, we can perceive how satisfactorily the 
best modern business methods can be applied in college 
affairs. In the state universities there must be a full 
annual accounting to the state, including the sum 
paid to each professor, etc. Our private institutions 
may be roughly divided in this regard into those whose 
books and accounts are open and those which consider 
themselves the closest kind of private corporations of 
whose financial affairs practically nothing is known, 
especially in detail, except to a few of those in control, 
who are frequently unable and often unwilling to un- 
derstand bookkeeping and a cost account. In this re- 
spect the reorganizer can make many improvements 
both for efficiency and true economy. I shall consider 



The Departments oj the College 23 

at its proper place the question of the extension of the 
functions of the financial department, so as to embrace 
a cost-account system for the college factory, a thing 
practically unknown at the present time. 

{b) It is not my purpose to discuss at length the in- 
structional or pedagogical department. In the first 
place, the topic is a dangerous one for a layman to 
handle, especially where, as in the present case, it 
might lead us away from our subject. Moreover, there 
is the widest divergence of opinion as to the merits 
among admitted experts. While undoubtedly some of 
our greatest teachers have been and still are found in 
college faculties, there are many, well qualified to judge, 
who insist that as a whole college pedagogy is at present 
the poorest of all grades. The principal of one of our 
finest fitting schools recently gave me the following 
reasons for this assertion. He told of a dean of a well- 
known law school who said to one of his second-year 
students who was doing very poor work: "I know of 
your preparatory school training and that you easily 
stood at the head of your class. I also know your 
father and that he is a very painstaking and studious 
lawyer. Why is it, then, that you are not doing better 
work in your law studies?" The young man repHed: 
*'To tell the truth, studious habits will not survive a 
four years' college course nowadays." The principal 
insisted that this had been the case with altogether too 
many others of the very brightest boys that he had sent 
to college during the past fifteen years; that these boys 
had been allowed, under college teachers, to degenerate 
like this young law student, and that this would not 



24 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

have happened in so large a proportion of such cases if 
the average college instructor understood and applied 
the principles of pedagogy as the teachers in our best 
kindergartens, and primary, grammar and high schools 
are now required to. Unfortunately, high-school prin- 
cipals and parents can cite too many examples to sus- 
tain their complaint. Judged by this standard, college 
pedagogy is too frequently a miserable failure, with 
terrible after results to the state, the individual student 
and the reputation of all higher learning. 

Looking at these charges against the quality of college 
pedagogy from the standpoint of a business man, I am 
convinced that they are largely true, and I argue it out 
in about this fashion : Every entering class is carefully 
looked over by the college coaches and trainers for 
available candidates for football, base ball, track and 
other teams, rowing crews, etc., and when such men 
are found they are carefully trained in every detail of the 
sport. So in many colleges every entering freshman is 
carefully canvassed by the various fraternities, and if he 
is available he is made a member, and immediately en- 
ters into a course of careful training, under competent 
fraternity coaches, to make him an honor to the fra- 
ternity. This belongs to the college home life as we 
shall see. Yet I cannot now remember any college 
where there are pedagogical coaches who, to the like 
extent, canvass every entering freshman, to get his 
measure as a student and to make sure that he knows 
how to study ; and if not, whose duty it is to teach him 
the fine points of the college training in their pedagogi- 
cal department. Such coaching, if given at all, is left 



The Departments of the College 25 

to the student life department and is widely and effi- 
ciently performed therein. Why not in the pedagogical 
department if its standards are high? 

This is not theoretical. For many years I have 
known intimately every freshman who entered my own 
chapter of my fraternity. Their ability to study and 
keep up has been carefully canvassed by the upper 
classmen, and some freshmen have been found who 
practically did not know how to study, but who ear- 
nestly wished to learn. Yet the college provides no 
pedagogical coach, and the luckless freshman, who may 
not appreciate his own weakness, must turn to the upper 
classmen for help. In too many colleges the pedagogi- 
cal formula is "root, freshman, or die" by the "busting 
out" process. Yet many institutions spend almost or 
quite a hundred thousand dollars annually upon 
athletics which are largely the coaching and training 
of a few likely athletic candidates. Good pedagogical 
practice would seem to demand that the college itself 
should spend at least one fifth of this amount in coach- 
ing and training its freshmen in the things which would 
make them better material for their instructors to work 
upon in the later years. 

But as I said before, this is dangerous ground for a 
layman. The shortcomings of college pedagogy and 
pedagogical methods have been carefully and fairly 
discussed by many experts in books and reviews. The 
latest is "The American College: A Criticism," by 
Abraham Flexner, whose stringent criticisms from the 
pedagogical side are apparently fully justified. 

But it seems to me that the fault lies not so much with 



26 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

college pedagogy as with the failure to draw a sharp 
distinction between pure pedagogy and the other de- 
partments of the college. Our mental confusion as to 
the functions of the departments of pedagogy and ad- 
ministration, and our utter neglect to study and elevate 
the student life department are chiefly responsible for 
the present pedagogical ineffectiveness and meager edu- 
cational results. But until the conditions are radically 
changed college pedagogy must continue to have a dis- 
proportionately large number of such failures charged 
to its account. 

(c) There are some promising patches of adminis- 
tration, some hopeful beginnings, in some institutions, 
but there is no such thing in any college as an up-to-date 
and separate administrative department comprehen- 
sively covering all parts of the institution. Yet when 
this is said to a college professor he looks dazed and 
asks: "Well, what do you mean by college administra- 
tion, and how could you improve upon what we have 
here?" The answer is not difficult: "Wipe off the 
slate, and commence over again. Few college pro- 
fessors have the least notion of what modern adminis- 
tration means or accomplishes, and therefore in most 
cases they cannot reorganize their present attempts at 
administration. The college must learn about the 
real article, and then build from the very bottom upon 
the foundation of this new ideal of a separate adminis- 
trative department. The present system has shown 
its insufficiency by the pass to which it has brought the 
college and its reputation and the reputation of college 
pedagogy. It is easier, safer and cheaper to build 



The Departments of the College 27 

anew than to patch up." These may seem harsh words, 
but they will appear mild before we have completed our 
exposition of what business administration is and does, 
and what the college administration is not, and what it 
fails to accomplish. In Part III, I shall show how the 
modern business administrative department has grown 
up and what are its functions, what it has done and is 
doing, and how indispensable it has become; and also 
how the college, as a whole and in each of its parts, is 
handicapped by the failure to provide an up-to-date 
administrative department along the lines of an or- 
dinary manufacturing concern dealing with a like num- 
ber of men and with interests correspondingly diverse. 

(d) I shall postpone the discussion of the college 
executive department until Chapter XXXIII. By that 
time we shall have studied the reorganized college in 
detail, and be better able to understand the functions 
and duties of its executive. 

(e) Nor shall I treat at length of the board of trustees 
or board of control in the scores of different forms in 
which it appears. Its powers and duties are usually 
defined by statute or charter and cannot be easily 
modified. For an excellent discussion of this subject 
the reader is commended to Chapter II of "College 
Administration," by Dr. Charles F. Thwing, President 
of Western Reserve University and Adelbert College, 
The Century Company, 1900. 

(/) The student life comprehends about ninety per 
cent of the undergraduate's time, and the instructional 
department the remaining ten per cent. That is to say, 
the average student does not spend ten per cent of his 



28 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

whole year in direct touch with his teachers. There are 
1 68 hours in the week, and usually the college, as dis- 
tinguished from the technical or graduate school, does 
not advise an undergraduate to carry more than five 
courses of three hours each per week. Often only four 
such courses are required. Thus, without cuts or va- 
cations, ten per cent with the professors is a good 
average, and frequently these hours may be spent in 
lecture courses chosen to produce the least possible 
draft upon the student's attention in the lecture room 
or upon his time outside of it. 

We should have expected that this ninety per cent 
would be carefully analyzed and studied by the teachers 
whose work in the ten per cent must be greatly affected 
by the influences that govern the ninety per cent. At 
least that would have been done by a business concern. 
Assume that A and B, two boys of equal capabilities, 
are in school together and that A is kept strictly and 
wisely at his home work by his parents, and compelled 
to attend to his school duties; while B is given the use 
of an automobile and is allowed to put all kinds of out- 
side distractions, or even vices, ahead of his school 
duties. Under these circumstances the teacher, with 
one half as much exertion, accomplishes twice as much 
with A as B. Hence the home factors of A to B are as 
four to one. This is precisely what is going on in all 
our colleges. The ninety per cent of the student life has 
been and still is ignored and not studied, and the in- 
structors wonder why the effectiveness of their teaching 
is about one quarter of what it ought to be. They 
have not thought out the true nature of the student life. 



The Departments of the College 29 

nor its effect upon their own work, nor the way to reach 
and affect it. But if we are to bring about a reorganiza- 
tion along modern business lines we must know all 
about this student life department and its bearing upon 
the other factors of our problem, and determine how it 
is to be handled in the future. These things will be 
treated in Part II. 

Because all of these departments (except the board 
of trustees) were originally almost exclusively under the 
direct personal control of the college president, and be- 
cause in the lower schools the instructor is the disci- 
plinarian, and because we still think of our colleges as 
modeled after the home and not after the community, 
we cling tenaciously to the notion that there is some in- 
herent connection between instruction and the college 
administration, and that a trained pedagogue must have 
charge of the discipline and administration. This is 
essentially fallacious and wasteful. In our reorganized 
institution we shall recognize that our college pedagogy 
should now be pedagogy pure and simple, as in the 
German universities, and provide accordingly. We 
shall also understand that few of our questions of ad- 
ministration are essentially pedagogical. Most of these 
are the problems, requiring systematic organization, 
which arise wherever there is a clashing of the diverse 
interests of large numbers of persons working in a 
common pursuit, whether under a great business, man- 
ufacturing or quasi public corporation, or in an army 
or navy, or in any other great aggregation of men. 

Until recently the numbers in our colleges were very 
small and hence there were very few and simple ad- 



30 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

ministrative questions to solve. At the end of her first 
125 years Harvard's classes numbered hardly twenty- 
five members each. In 1850 (212 years) she had 286 
undergraduates, while Princeton had 232 and Columbia 
179. At the same time the simple social conditions, 
and the lack of surplus wealth and of facilities for 
travel, and the absence of large cities made all problems 
of living comparatively simple. We shall perceive that 
it is not lack of teaching forces or ability, but numbers 
and size and intricacy and failure to understand the 
basic change in our college concept which are upsetting 
our college economy. 

As we proceed in our investigations we shall realize 
that our present need of reorganization in large part 
comes from the fact that, quite outside of pedagogical 
conditions, the administration is terribly crude, un- 
scientific and insufficient, and that the student life is 
too often neglected, unstudied and misunderstood, and 
the executive hampered, and that true financial economy 
and system are disregarded, and that no satisfactory re- 
sults can be expected while there is such a lack of 
intelligent coordination. 

Within the last generation, the science of medicine 
has been immensely improved, and trained nursing 
has become a science. Candid physicians admit that 
trained nursing is now more than half the battle and 
that medicine would not be what it is without the aid of 
the trained nurse. What modem medicine would have 
been without trained nursing can be seen in modern 
college teaching, for it has not perceived that adminis- 
tration, and especially the student life, should have 



The Departments of the College 31 

stood in the same relation to it that nursing does to 
medicine. But instead of being such aids, the admin- 
istrative and student life departments actually have 
been clogs. They are dead weights which pedagogy 
has been dragging behind it, while it wondered that, 
at a time when its teachers were admittedly improving, 
the results upon the students were more and more un- 
satisfactory. 

Pedagogy is the skilled physician who handles many 
and diverse cases, but administration and the student 
life are the departments which have charge of the in- 
dividual patients outside of the times of the physician's 
visits, and which insure the best results from those 
visits. The doctor has charge of the case, but he has 
many other patients and duties, and must have the ser- 
vices of skilled assistants or nurses who can insure that 
his instructions are followed and who can have charge 
of the individual patients during the intervals between 
visits. In earlier days the instructor lived in the 
college family or college home, but not so now. As 
modern medicine is largely dependent upon modern 
nursing, so the highly specialized pedagogues of our 
modern colleges will be found to need the services of an 
agency which supplements their work and makes it 
effective. For her first century and a quarter Harvard 
assigned a tutor to each class, who taught that class in 
all its subjects for four years, subject to the small 
amount of additional instruction given by the president 
and the one or more professors. When the college was 
thus administered there was no need of any supple- 
mentary coaching for the pedagogues. 



32 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Our chief need in reorganizing is to resuscitate, re- 
construct and make potent these two great departments 
of administrative and student life, now dead and useless 
— or worse — and to restore the executive to its normal 
functions. 



PART II 
THE STUDENT LIFE DEPARTMENT 



CHAPTER V 

THE COLLEGE NOW A QUASI PUBLIC CORPORATION — 
NOT A SCHOOL BASED UPON THE HOME 

In a tract entitled "Looking Backward," Helen 
Hunt Jackson showed how the Indian pappoose, 
carried on its mother's back and always looking back- 
ward, saw things not as they approached but only 
after they had passed and were receding, and that this 
was the plight of the whole Indian race under our 
criminally wrong system of wardship. 

In our colleges the poor old pedagogical mother is 
still lugging two strapping infants who, looking back- 
ward, exhaust her strength and make her less efficient 
in the duties which she is best suited to perform, while 
their own education and growth are as constantly 
stunted. The powers and efficiency of pedagogy will 
be doubled by the growth of one of these children, ad- 
ministration, to the strength, work and duties of an 
adult. The same is as true of the other child, the 
student life. When it, too, shall have been developed, 
we shall have the efficiency and general usefulness of 
the college augmented by two splendid powers which 
will work with the enthusiasm of youth toward the com- 
mon good, but especially toward the solution of the 
new questions of administration and of the internal and 
organic content of the student life. These new de- 

35 



36 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

partments must together assume the solution of many 
things which pedagogy has long since abandoned in 
despair — although she has not always realized this, nor 
frankly confessed it even if she did realize it. The 
college as a whole, the individual undergraduates — for 
whom, in fact, it was organized and exists — and the cause 
of higher education, citizenship and scholarship must 
suffer until the departments of administration and the 
student life exercise their proper functions. 

This leads us, then, to the careful study, first, of the 
student life, so that we may understand its essentially 
dual nature, its real place in the college economy and in 
the education of the embryo citizen, and the steps 
necessary under our reorganization plan to put this 
powerful factor in condition to do its great part in 
college work; and, second, of the separate administra- 
tive department. 

But before we can understand the present meaning 
of these departments we must fully realize the change 
that has taken place in the very nature of the college 
itself. It is still spoken of as merely an educational in- 
stitution, and thus is put upon a par in our minds 
with the ordinary school or with the earlier college. 
This was true in the old boarding-school-ecclesiastical 
periods when the college was a small poverty-stricken 
aggregation of teachers and taught, which had no funds 
of its own to supply its constantly increasing wants, but 
was largely dependent for money upon the Colonial 
legislature, with its politico-religious notions, and 
which derived the mass of its pupils from private 
schools or tutors and not from a public-school system. 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 37 

But now many universities and colleges are powerful 
and rich corporations, with rights, properties and funds 
guaranteed under the broadest charters and often under 
the terms of the state constitution. Several universities 
have property enough to pay in full the debt of any 
state in the Union, except Massachusetts, or of any city, 
except New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, 
Chicago or Cleveland; and the yearly receipts and ex- 
penditures of many of the states fall far below those of 
some of the rich corporations which we call colleges or 
universities. 

Hence we must come to realize that these great in- 
stitutions no longer resemble the school after which they 
were originally modeled, but have grown and developed 
into a new form of state or community, and should be 
thought of rather as bodies politic than as bodies cor- 
porate. They have the following characteristics, 
among others, of a political or municipal community 
or corporation : (a) a fixed location or boundary within 
which their power is substantially supreme; (6) rights 
guaranteed by law, and often by the state constitution, 
beyond the control of even the state legislature; (c) 
large investments in fixed improvements, for public, not 
private, uses; {d) large annual incomes devoted to public, 
not private, purposes ; {e) the right to tax for their own 
general purposes those who dwell within their borders 
and share their benefits ; yet (/) relief in large part from 
the taxation of their own property; {g) a lack of power 
to compel any individual to remain within their sphere 
of influence; yet {h) the right to lay down rules to 
govern, within certain limitations, the personal lives and 



38 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

actions of their student citizens, who, so long as they re- 
main students, have well-defined rights and duties toward 
the college state or community, their fellow-students 
and their college homes, which relations resemble 
closely those of the citizen of any ordinary community 
or state. The colleges are not charitable or business 
corporations any more than the state or community, 
which also have many charitable and business functions. 
It must be admitted that now our great universities and 
colleges much more closely resemble municipal cor- 
porations (using the word ''municipal" in the broad 
sense of a state, or of a city or some lesser governmental 
corporation within the state) than they do any other 
form of corporate existence or entity known to the law. 
Hence it will be profitable at this point to follow out 
this analogy to its legitimate conclusions, for it may 
very seriously affect the plans which we must pursue in 
order to bring about a scientific and permanent reor- 
ganization. 

This change of form, from that of a private corpo- 
ration to one which is quasi public, is not unique nor 
confined to the colleges, but is something which is going 
on all the time and with which we are fully acquainted 
in other instances. For example, our first railroad 
charter was granted as a part of a well-defined policy 
which the State of New York had been carrying out for 
a generation in developing her lines of internal com- 
munication, and was closely modeled after the turnpike 
company charters of which several hundred had been 
already granted. The new road was intended to be 
merely a private corporation owning and keeping in 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 39 

order, for use by all comers, a turnpike with fixed rails, 
and was given the right 

"to regulate the time and manner in which goods and pas- 
sengers shall be transported, taken and carried on the same, 
as well as the manner in which they shall collect all tolls 
and dues on account of transportation and carriage, and 
shall have power to erect and maintain toll houses and other 
buildings for the accommodation of their concerns as they 
may deem suitable to their interest;" 

also, 

"from time to time to fix, regulate and receive the tolls and 
charges by them to be received for transportation of prop- 
erty and persons." 1 

Shortly thereafter twelve further charters were 
granted by the New York legislature under which other 
roads were built; and these roads, then ten in number, 
were consolidated in 1853 to form the New York Cen- 
tral Railroad, running from Albany to Buffalo and 
Niagara Falls, with a total mileage of about 400 miles 
of single track. 

These poverty-stricken turnpike railroads were not 
a menace to the state. They had no political or finan- 
cial power. They were experimental innovations and 
suppliants, and had not yet become the most powerful 
entity in the state, arrogantly exclaiming (as did the 
head of this system in later years): "The people be 
damned. We'd rather carry hogs than people." 

The gradual changes by which these quasi turnpike 
railroads, seldom over thirty miles in length, have de- 
veloped into the huge modern trunk line are substan- 
tially the same as those by which our primitive colleges 

'N. Y. Laws of 1826, Chap. 253. 



40 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

have developed into our huge modern universities. As 
the years have passed the raihoads have ceased to be 
private concerns and have assumed more and more the 
character of public corporations, exercising exclusive 
franchises received from the state. They have, with 
other similar corporations, grown into a class by them- 
selves, which for want of a better name we call public- 
service or public-utilities corporations. 

In precisely the same way, and without our realizing it, 
the colleges have changed, in fact and in law, to quasi 
municipal corporations with a closer resemblance to the 
state or community, in their duties, rights, powers and 
content, than to anything else; and with these new 
powers have developed new responsibilities. 

In following out this resemblance it will be found, 
also, that the relations which the citizen or student of 
the college bears to it are no longer those of the board- 
ing school based upon the home, but are rather of the 
same threefold nature which the citizen of the state 
or community bears to it, namely : first, to the state and 
its government; second, to his fellow-citizens as a body 
or in a business, professional or community way; and 
third, to his own home and to those to whom he bears 
kinship or other intimate social relations. 

First, in his relation to the state or government, the 
citizen is governed almost entirely by well-defined laws 
which are in the form of written statutes or ordinances. 

In the second relation of citizen to citizen, the indi- 
vidual is governed principally by contract, comity, 
civility and rules governing business and personal con- 
tact — that is, by usage and custom, with but little direct 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 41 

interference from the state by written law or ordinance. 
It is easy to perceive how his community or business or 
professional life is apparently of vastly greater impor- 
tance to the ordinary individual than his political or 
civic relations to the commonwealth; although in one 
sense the latter are at the very foundation of the former. 
There is no law requiring a man to pay his debts by 
bank checks nor to receive payments in that kind of 
private currency. Yet ninety-five per cent of our ex- 
changes are made by the privately agreed medium of 
checks rather than by the publicly ordained coin or 
bank or United States currency. Substantially all the 
immense transactions of our commerce and daily busi- 
ness affairs are within the realm of private contract, 
with an appeal to the courts only in case of dispute. In 
other words, in his business, professional or community 
life the citizen is governed, so far as he is governed at 
all, by custom or good manners, or by written or oral 
contracts, which in turn are more likely to be affected 
and governed by an enlightened public sentiment or 
even by the newspapers than by any statute or written 
ordinance. 

In the third relation, that of the home and th-e per- 
sonal friend, the citizen is substantially a law unto him- 
self, unless riotous or other public misconduct passes 
the limits set by the law and subjects him to its penal- 
ties. This privacy of the home, with the right under its 
own rules to govern its own inmates, is one of our most 
ancient and cherished rights. Three hundred years 
ago Sir Edward Coke held that "The house of everyone 
is to him as his castle and fortress, as well for his de- 



42 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

fense against injury and violence as for his repose." 
He had in mind the fact that within his own castle the 
English lord was supreme, except in certain matters as 
to which he owed fealty to his overlord. In other 
words, the will of its head or of its older or stronger 
members is the law of the home, so long as the public 
peace or public rights are not infringed. In many re- 
spects the written law, and even the constitution and 
the bill of rights, halt at the door of the home and are 
inapplicable within its portals; for many things are not 
crimes when done within the seclusion of the home 
which would be punishable as such if done in public. 

Thus we see that the citizen of the state lives under 
the threefold control (a) of the written statute or or- 
dinance promulgated by the general or local govern- 
ment; (b) of public sentiment, or usage or contract, 
arranged between man and man; and (c) of the rules and 
limitations of his own home, for which he himself is 
mainly responsible. These various kinds of regula- 
tions governing the conduct of the citizen belong to 
different classes, with different powers and punish- 
ments, acting upon different planes, and upon different 
sides of the citizen's character and upon different 
phases of his life, and through widely differing instru- 
mentalities. He may be large minded or narrow 
minded in his political or civic relations to the general 
or local government, or in his business or professional 
relations, or in his attitude toward his home and his 
friends. He may be distinguished, or quite the con- 
trary, in any one or more of these relations; but the fact 
that the life of the ordinary breadwinner is lived upon 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 43 

these three planes should be kept clearly before our 
minds as we study the quasi college state and its 
student citizens. 

The statute law fills but a small part in the life of 
the law-abiding citizen, who performs, as a matter of 
course, most of his duties toward the state. The major 
part of his time is divided between the community and 
home planes of his life. Reform in the domain of the 
state must be brought about by beneficent and wise 
laws and a rigid enforcement of the written law, backed 
by a public sentiment which compels all executive, ad- 
ministrative, legislative and judicial forces to do their 
duty. Reform in the sphere of the business or com- 
munity life must be brought about by elevating public 
sentiment and then enforcing it by common consent. 
But reform within the home must come through the 
dominant powers therein; that is, the parents or other 
heads of the family, backed oftentimes by a consensus 
of that particular local division of the social order, not 
so broad as to be called public sentiment, that some 
specific change is desirable. In other words reform 
comes in each plane through the power which is domi- 
nant therein — in the state through the statute law; in 
the community through public consent or private agree- 
ment; in the home through the heads thereof. But 
through all these planes runs something corresponding 
to an enlightened public sentiment. 

Nor, in tracing the resemblance of the college to the 
community, must we overlook the striking dissimilarity 
among governmental corporations of the same class. 
As nations of equal rank differ among themselves in 



44 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

constitutions, laws, customs and peoples, so our forty- 
six sovereign states have constitutions, laws and cus- 
toms which differ in many particulars; each county 
within a state may make dissimilar rules for its citizens; 
each city within the county or state may be governed by 
a charter and ordinances varying from those of a neigh- 
boring city; each minor municipal subdivision has the 
power to regulate its affairs so that in some respects they 
will vary from that of any of its fellows ; and each home 
is a law unto itself. This dissimilarity does not change 
the essential similarity of the class in general structure, 
purposes and powers, and yet must be carefully re- 
garded in considering the individuals of the class. 

We find this same sitartling dissimilarity between our 
various colleges, universities and technical schools, in 
rights, powers, charters, customs and internal govern- 
ment and rule, but as striking a similarity in intent and 
content. The great objects of the various institutions 
remain substantially the same, but, like the various 
states and other municipalities, each institution must 
work out its own objects in its own way. 

Hence in our reorganization of the college state, 
community and home, we must proceed with a con- 
stant appreciation that there are local differences which 
must never be lost sight of, and an autonomy which is 
important because it evinces and typifies the organic 
life from which it has come. Our reorganization plan 
must be broad enough to allow for the individual differ- 
ences in the various institutions to which reference has 
already been made, and to attain results notwith- 
standing these differences. 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 45 

A little further reflection will show us how complete 
has been this change from the simplicity of the original 
conception of the boarding-school college based upon the 
home to the complexity of the modern quasi college state. 

The earliest New England colleges were designed to 
be the official theological seminaries of their respective 
colonies. Harvard was founded because the colonists 
dreaded "to leave an illiterate ministery to the churches 
after our present ministers [who had been educated in 
England] shall lie in the dust." ' 

In Connecticut the original thought was to found "a 
college in which youth might be fitted for public service 
in church and state"; but the church before the 
state, and it was out of this thought that Yale sprang. 
But the pupils in these colleges, so-called, were mere 
boys of from twelve to seventeen years of age, and were 
ruled by Puritan teachers who were considered solely 
and only as in loco parentis,^ and as responsible for the 
college home life and manners of the pupils and for tlie 
small amount of the college community life. 

The evolution from this first form has been a long but 
complete one, until to-day we find that the students of 
the college maintain to it, not the relation of children in 
a home or school, but rather of citizens within a state, 
and that such relation is threefold: {a) to the central 
body or government as embodied in the financial, in- 
structional, administrative and executive departments; 
{b) to each other in the college community life; and {c) 
to their intimates in their college homes. Moreover, 

1 " New England's First Fruits," p. i. 

* "Individual Training in Our Colleges," Chap, I-IV. 



46 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

the same general classes of rules govern the citizens of 
this little state or community as control the conduct 
of the citizens of the ordinary municipal corporation. 
(a) In their relations toward the college itself and its 
government, the law is the charter and the written or- 
dinances which, under the charter, the institution, by 
its officers, faculty or board of control, may make to 
regulate its property and affairs and the lives of its 
students in their relation to it as a quasi state, and not 
much farther, (b) The larger relation of student to 
student in the college community life is that of citizen 
to citizen, and is to be regulated, in most instances, not 
so much by college ordinances — as in the earlier times, 
when the student's every move was thus controlled — 
but rather by college usages, agreements, customs and 
good breeding. This portion of the college life must be 
chiefly controlled by good and clean college conditions 
and by an enlightened public sentiment which it is the 
vital interest of the college to raise to the highest pos- 
sible level. It should accomplish this not by legisla- 
tion, except as a last resort, but rather by those influ- 
ences which legitimately enlighten, elevate and enforce 
public opinion, customs and contracts in business and 
elsewhere. Certainly of all places in the world it ought 
not to be difficult, without the use of rigid regulations, 
to foster and maintain a lofty public sentiment and 
atmosphere in an American college. Here, if any- 
where, the consent of the governed ought to be sufficient 
to put the relations of student to student — the college 
community life — upon the highest moral, ethical and 
refined level. 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 47 

(c) So to-day, corresponding to the relation of the 
citizen to his home, there are college homes which are 
the "fortress and castle" of their inmates, which are 
not to be stormed from without, but, like ordinary 
homes, are to be chiefly controlled by the molding in- 
fluences of those who are at the head of the castle and 
fortress and manage its affairs, and whose word is the 
law therein. 

This similarity of the college state to other municipal 
corporations is subject to one important qualification. 
A large proportion of its citizens are legally minors, and 
a still larger proportion are not yet self-supporting 
breadwinners. Hence there are certain rights of 
parents and guardians which call for a more or less 
distinct recognition from the college, and which must 
be reckoned with as we study our problem of reorganiza- 
tion. But all this merely puts a higher and more per- 
sonal responsibility upon the institution as to those 
matters in which it is still regarded as in loco parentis; 
a threefold responsibility, to the state, the parents and 
the students themselves. This lingering remnant of 
the past does not make the similarity of the college to 
the municipality less striking; for the state and muni- 
cipal governments have assumed and are carrying out 
the training of their own youth, and for this purpose, 
as to more than half our students, the state universities 
are the direct agents of the commonwealth. Further- 
more, every college is directly dependent, for students, 
upon the public schools, and demands that the public- 
school curriculum shall be articulated with its own, as 
will be more fully shown. 



48 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

At this point I call attention again to the words 
"college" and "college life" as used herein. They are 
intended to apply to the students of all institutions — 
no matter what their position in the higher educational 
scale — whose student lives are wholly or principally 
spent in college homes or within the influence of a 
college community which affects them as citizens there- 
in. Of course I do not imply that the college has 
not still the power as a sovereign corporation, subject 
only to a limited control by the legislature and courts, 
to make written ordinances which shall, necessarily or 
unnecessarily, wisely or unwisely, attempt to control 
the relations of student to student, or the internal 
affairs of the college homes, and which must be obeyed 
or evaded if the student is to remain within the juris- 
diction of the college state. Historically the college has 
always had and exercised this power, and certainly it 
has never, as a matter of law, lost these rights. But 
social and educational conditions have so far changed 
that the ill-advised use of such an obsolete power by 
the college will be the same as in the ordinary com- 
munity where an unwise law or ordinance will either 
be repealed or become a dead letter; and in either 
event the prestige of the government and of all law 
suffers. 

If, following the rule of the times, there has been this 
complete evolution and revolution in the nature of our 
colleges, it is manifestly ill advised for them to attempt 
to govern their student citizens, in the planes of their 
community life or college home, by college legislation 
or ordinances, as was done in the seventeenth and 



The College a Quasi Public Corporation 49 

eighteenth centuries. Such laws in regard to these 
personal matters were frequently evaded then, and 
must become practically dead letters under modern 
conditions. Our colleges have largely abandoned all 
attempts to enforce these obsolete provisions, but have 
failed to substitute any suitable modern agencies to 
accomplish the same desirable ends, and hence the con- 
ditions of the student life have too frequently become 
chaotic, unless student agencies have provided some- 
thing to take the place of the ancient ordinances. 

Furthermore, if our colleges have come to partake of 
the nature of the ordinary state or community, then {a) 
the principles of their government and internal rela- 
tions are to be found, not in ancient boarding-school 
college methods, but in a new form of civics, political 
economy and administration, especially applicable to 
this new form of political entity, {h) If we would study 
the college community life and the relations therein 
of the students to each other, let us go directly to the 
highest forms of the rules and customs which govern 
the relations of man to man in modern business or pro- 
fessional life or in society, (c) If we would know more 
of the college home and its power for good or evil upon 
the functions of the college, and in the college com- 
munity life and in the lives of its own inmates, let us 
study the ordinary homes from which our students 
come, and be assured that in the best thereof we shall 
find the pattern for the highest form of the college home. 

If, then, the American college has in recent years 
become a quasi state or community, this is another 
potent reason for an organic and intelligent reorganiza- 



50 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

tion of the whole college economy and methods along 
these new lines; for a revamping of many of our no- 
tions about the college and its government; and for 
examining still more closely the true nature of the 
college community life and of the college home, and 
their vital bearing upon the college itself and its good 
name and future, and upon each and all of its other 
departments, and upon the individual training and 
work in after life of each and every undergraduate. 

But, as in the life of the ordinary breadwinner, re- 
forms must be brought about in a philosophical way in 
the various planes of that life, so, in the life of the 
student, constant and intelligent pressure must be 
brought to bear upon and through the forces dominant 
in the field where the evils exist, and this has been the 
course of all true progress so far made in the colleges. 

Every endeavor to bring about student government 
has been an unconscious step in the working out of 
this ideal of the college state and the tendencies in that 
direction are constantly growing broader and stronger. 
Every fraternity home built by the alumni at the so- 
licitation of the undergraduates has been an uncon- 
scious demonstration that powerful forces were working 
within the college state and community toward the 
realization of the college home. The fact that there are 
now more college students rooming in the homes pro- 
vided by the fraternities than in the college dormitories 
shows how powerful has been this force which the stu- 
dents themselves have brought to bear toward a reor- 
ganization of the college economy. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE RELATION OF THE COLLEGE TO THE COMMON- 
WEALTH 

But we have yet to consider the new relations which, 
because of changed powers and conditions, the college 
and the university bear to the commonwealth itself. 
When this country was a vast wilderness, and its chief 
products were those of the forest and the sea, and 
government was largely by English proconsuls, and the 
chief use of learning was to attempt to apply Old Testa- 
ment texts to New England ecclesiastical politics, a 
college education was a luxury rather than a necessity; 
a setting of occasional individuals above and apart from 
their fellows, rather than a preparation for work with 
and among their fellows who had themselves received 
a good education in the public high schools. We must 
keep constantly before us the fact that in the earlier 
days the college course was designed to train controver- 
sialists in an age of scriptural controversy. We have 
absolutely no use for such scholars to-day. They would 
be laughed to scorn. In fact, a theological library of 
even forty years ago is now practically valueless except 
as a curiosity. It is but little more than thirty years 
since one of the foremost of our New England college 
presidents annually delivered an hour's lecture to his 
senior class as to whether or not the Tabernacle built 

51 



52 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

by Moses had a ridge pole; and I am ashamed to admit 
that I cannot remember to which side he gaye the de- 
cision. Moreover, in the earlier days, a college educa- 
tion had a tendency to build up an aristocracy in colo- 
nies which still clung to the aristocratic ideas which they 
brought from their mother countries, and which were 
being constantly recruited therefrom. ' There was noth- 
ing in the least resembling our modern system of uni- 
versal and compulsory graded primary, secondary and 
high-school education. 

But the present is increasingly an age of scientific 
accuracy and detail, of specialization and differentia- 
tion. New and startling questions are arising in the 
domain of the state itself, as well as in the arts, sciences 
and professions, and in business and commerce. These 
questions are political, ethical, sociological, economic, 
and but rarely religious. They strike at those founda- 
tions of society which, at least in this country, we had 
thought were fixed forever. These issues arise in con- 
nection with the greatest problem of race assimilation 
which the world has ever seen or is likely to see. While 
our growth has been phenomenal, it has raised up ex- 
ternal competitors and engendered internal conflicts 
which require the nation and each of its component 
parts to muster all their forces — and the greatest and 
most promising of these is education, universal, com- 
pulsory, free, and constantly broader and higher. 

It follows, therefore, that the evolution of our col- 
leges into corporations exercising some of the functions 
of the state is no more accidental than the growth of the 

* "Individual Training in Our Colleges," Chap. III. 



Relation of College to Commonwealth 53 

quasi turnpike railroads into vast corporations to which, 
through their franchises, the state has now turned over 
so many of its own functions. These latter corpora- 
tions have received their present rights and powers not 
because they were railroads, but rather because modern 
conditions demanded that in some manner there should 
be provided the transportation facilities which we now 
have. It was felt that the state was not fitted to fur- 
nish these accommodations, and hence by the consent of 
its citizens it freely conferred upon the railroad corpora- 
tions the rights which would enable them to do what the 
state does in other countries. But the conferring of 
public functions upon a corporation necessarily implies 
that that corporation may and should, to a correspond- 
ing extent, be held accountable to the public for the 
proper use of the powers so conferred. Gradually and 
almost imperceptibly the railroads have been the re- 
cipients of valuable franchises and rights from the 
state, and we are now beginning to appreciate that the 
state can and should demand adequate and proper re- 
turns from the corporations which it has so splendidly 
endowed. 

In the same manner, and as imperceptibly, the col- 
leges and universities have become the official or un- 
official capstones of a vast system of public primary, 
secondary and high-school instruction, upon which this 
country is now spending over $300,000,000 annually, 
with an annual increase of about $30,000,000, and 
which represents a past investment of billions of dollars. 

It is a very recent policy that the state itself should 
provide and enforce a compulsory and universal educa- 



54 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

tion in book learning; going, if necessary, so far as to 
set up truant schools and to punish the parents of truant 
children. We have reversed the earlier notion that 
book learning, and especially the higher education, were 
matters for the home or the church. Hence the col- 
leges have become an important factor in a new educa- 
tional system which has its mainspring in the common- 
wealth rather than in the family or the church. In the 
older times the individual or his parents or his church 
determined whether he should have an opportunity for 
book learning. Now he is born into a state policy of 
universal education which is as fundamental as the 
form of government. The main object of this system 
of universal and compulsory education by the state is 
to train for an enlightened citizenship under a system 
of universal and almost compulsory suffrage. Under 
these conditions, and as in the case of the railroads and 
other public-service corporations, the public has felt 
that the colleges were better fitted than the state to 
exercise many of its educational functions. Hence the 
policy has been deliberately adopted and generously 
carried out of endowing these outside agencies — often 
survivors from the time when there was no compulsory 
education — to exercise what are now in a strict sense 
public functions. Especially at the East we are apt to 
think of our great system of higher learning as a mat- 
ter of private corporations and rights, without stop- 
ping to consider how the private colleges have become, 
every one of them, quasi public corporations — and in 
a sense public-service corporations — directly owing im- 
portant duties to the state which has conferred such 



Relation oj College to Commonwealth 55 

immense powers and benefits upon them, with the 
understanding, express or implied, that they shall 
recognize and freely perform their reciprocal obliga- 
tions to the state. 

State aid implies the right of the state to call for an 
adequate return at the proper time and in the proper 
way; and every college has had state aid, if only in the 
way of relief from taxation. Furthermore, the whole 
public-school system supported by the state is modeled 
so as to connect with and feed the colleges, private as 
well as public. For this aid the colleges owe a cor- 
responding obligation to the commonwealth which they 
must freely recognize and conscientiously perform. At 
least ninety per cent of the students of the Eastern 
colleges and probably ninety-five per cent of those of 
the Western colleges have received the whole or the 
major part of their preliminary education in the public 
schools. Prior to the nineteenth century these pro- 
portions were about reversed. The student body of 
even the privately endowed Eastern colleges would be 
practically wiped out and not ten per cent would re- 
main if the undergraduates educated at the expense of 
the state were withdrawn. The colleges demand, and 
the state docilely agrees, that the $300,000,000 of an- 
nual outlay upon the public schools shall be so ex- 
pended as to deliver at the doors of the colleges the 
pick of the state's yearly crop of future citizens. 

But the duty of the college to the state in regard to 
this wealth of future citizen material thus delivered, 
without expense, is not even confined to the state which 
has conferred the college charter. For example, Amherst 



56 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

and Williams each have more students from New York 
State — and hence who were fitted mostly in New York 
schools — than from Massachusetts; and a very large 
majority of their students come from other states than 
Massachusetts. Hence these colleges are, to this ex- 
tent, the capstones of the systems of the public education 
of states other than Massachusetts which incorporated 
them and to whose laws they are directly amenable. In 
1908-9 only 147 out of 523, or twenty-eight per cent, of 
the students of Amherst came from Massachusetts 
homes, while 168, or thirty-two per cent, came from New 
York homes. Therefore, in a limited sense, Amherst 
College is not so much a private and privately endowed 
college under the laws of Massachusetts as she is a 
public servant and a link in the public-school system of 
New York and other states, each of which by law 
recognizes an Amherst College diploma as on a par with 
the diplomas of their own colleges. Yet New York 
does not recognize a license to practice medicine or law 
in Massachusetts as entitling its holder to practice in 
New York, although she fully recognizes the degrees of 
the colleges of Massachusetts as on a par with those of 
New York colleges. Hence we see that a college degree 
has a general recognition, while a professional license 
has not, unless with a further and local examination 
and qualification. Except as to direct grants of public 
funds the denominational colleges are under as great 
obligations to the state as any other institutions of 
higher learning. Imagine the plight of any college 
which could not draw a single pupil who had been at 
any time taught in the public schools. Hence even the 



Relation oj College to Commonwealth 57 

private colleges rest directly upon the public-school 
system and are thus public servants. 

The wonderful liberality of our nation to our schools, 
colleges and universities is a matter of amazement to 
the peoples of Europe. About a year ago a native born 
Hungarian wrote to some home newspapers stating 
that the total expenditures in the United States for 
educational purposes for the year 1903-4 had been 
$344,216,227. The story was received with utter in- 
credulity, and the suggestion was made, editorially, 
that the decimal mark had been inadvertently moved 
one point to the right ; that the true figures should have 
been $34,421,622; and that even this was a case of 
Yankee bragging and exaggeration. The correspond- 
ent's father, who was himself a minister of the govern- 
ment, wrote a warning against making such ridic- 
ulous mistakes. For vindication it became necessary to 
send over the official reports of the United States De- 
partment of Education to show that not only were 
the figures correctly given for 1903-4, but that in 
1904-5 the outlay was $376,996,472, and in 1905-6, 
$399,688,910. 

These enormous expenditures, chiefly from the public 
moneys, are cheerfully made because the nation and all 
its parts realize that there must be provided the widest 
and best training and education for citizenship — a train- 
ing and education that shall be practically universal, 
and which assuredly ought to be applicable and effect- 
ive in all of the planes of the personal life of every future 
citizen of the state. Hence we find that the public- 
school training and education aim not only to teach tlie 



58 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

three R's and other book learning, but also to give 
manual and domestic science and physiological training 
which shall enable the pupils to become better bread- 
winners, husbands, wives and parents. 

We are apt to think that we do not draw the line of 
state control closely enough upon our railroads, and 
sufficiently force them to realize and perform their 
duties as public servants. At the same time we quite 
overlook how much the colleges owe to the state, and 
how, more than ever before, they fall short when they 
fail to do everything in their power to fulfill the pre- 
eminent duties which they owe to the state and which 
they alone can perform for it; since to them alone have 
been granted the exclusive rights and enormous sub- 
sidies which have been conferred upon our institutions 
of higher learning. This change in the duties and 
functions of the colleges and universities must be taken 
into full account in our reorganization, for we must 
recognize more fully than ever before the duties which 
the colleges, private and public, now owe to the public 
and to the state, entirely apart from and almost above 
the duties which they owe to their own undergraduates, 
alumni, faculty or denominations. As we proceed we 
shall see how the colleges would fare if they were under 
the same governmental rule as their fellow public ser- 
vants, the railroads, and what kind of showing they 
would make under rules similar to those of the Inter- 
state Commerce Commission. 

The college is, in its relation to the commonwealth, a 
quasi city, but it is " a city set on a hill that cannot be 
hid." It should be a pattern to its sister municipalities 



Relation of College to Commonwealth 59 

in the fairness and administration of its laws, in the 
cleanness of its public sentiment, and in the uplifting 
qualities of its home life. It must not be pointing out 
to its students the motes in the eye of the ordinary 
municipality when there are beams in its own eye. 

It is not merely a pedagogical matter if the college 
authorities, through their blindness and lack of admin- 
istration, have often allowed the college atmosphere to 
become debased and the college home life to be brought 
to a low level. This is a question of the highest moment 
to the commonwealth and its homes, its parents and its 
citizens. As a business proposition and as a matter of 
justice and right, there must be a complete change, 
quite regardless, if need be, of the personal feelings of 
the men who are responsible for such a reprehensible 
state of affairs — whether their sins be those of omission 
or commission, whether their fault arises from not doing 
themselves or from failing to call upon those, outside 
their own ranks, who could at least have kept college 
affairs at their former high level. 

Possibly, in a sense, the decadence in college con- 
ditions has not been due altogether to the pedagogues, 
but in large part to the commonwealth, and to its homes, 
its parents and its citizens. For college teachers and 
students are, and must to a great degree continue to be, 
the products of the commonwealth and its homes, its 
parents and its citizens. We shall be constantly and 
increasingly impressed, as we proceed, with the feel- 
ing that the great reform in the colleges must indeed 
come from the outside and not by mere reliance 
upon the college instructors; yet that the leadership 



6o The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

in that great reform must come from the colleges them- 
selves. 

Hence as we analyze the colleges and their short- 
comings, and plead for a reorganization along business 
lines and upon business principles, and for a college 
education and training for citizenship, let us not think 
that we are dealing solely with private vested rights 
which must be considered sacred; but rather that we 
are demanding that our most important public ser- 
vants — which have been endowed with great privileges, 
and which have received immense sums from the public 
funds, and in partial aid of which the country annually 
spends $300,000,000 — shall be held to the strictest ac- 
countability to the state, and to the humblest home, 
parent and citizen therein that may be adversely 
affected by any unnecessary evils in such high places. 
The best possible reorganization, upon the best possible 
business basis, and if necessary with extensive state 
aid, is not a whit too much to ask of our colleges, 
especially as that is what they themselves should be 
clamoring for. The true and close relations of the 
colleges to the state and the public will constantly 
recur as we proceed in our discussion. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE STUDENT LIFE DEPARTMENT AND THE COLLEGE 
COMMUNITY LIFE 

We have seen that there are three planes in the Hfe 
of the ordinary citizen and breadwinner, viz.: his 
duties to the state, to his community, business or pro- 
fessional circle, and to his home and personal friends; 
and that, in a similar manner, the undergraduate sus- 
tains a threefold relation to his college state, community 
and home; and that the two last-named relations are 
comprehended in the student life department which 
comprises at least ninety per cent of the student's time. 
We must consider now the student life department as 
a whole and the college community life in particular, 
and what should be their position and treatment in the 
reorganized college. The college home life will be dis- 
cussed in later chapters. 

This great department of the college, the student 
life, was not well differentiated in the early days, but 
has now become almost, if not quite, the controlling 
part of college life. At first the young boys, who 
usually graduated from college at seventeen or eighteen, 
were constantly under the watchful guard of president, 
professors and tutors. They were subject to flogging, 
and in the freshman year to fagging by all the upper 
classmen, bachelors, masters, tutors, professors and 

6i 



62 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

president, under elaborate Freshman Servitude rules. 
The pupils studied, recited, ate and slept in the same 
building, under the closest guard of their tutors, who 
were hard-headed and hard-handed Puritans, who be- 
lieved in original sin, and who lived in an age in which 
the statute law provided that a child that smote or 
cursed its parents might be put to death. This watch 
and guard continued from 5.15 a.m. in summer and 
from 6.30 A.M. in winter, through to a compulsory and 
early bedtime, with four short "playtimes," aggre- 
gating four and one-half hours in length, during which 
"the schollar" might "be absent from his studies or 
appointed exercises." Out of these playtimes must 
come some of the meals and, for the freshmen, fagging. 
During all the rest of the day, and after sundown on 
Saturday and on all of the Sabbath, the boys must be 
in their rooms or at college exercises. With no money, 
time or facilities for getting away from the college town, 
it is not wonderful that everyone came to consider the 
college course as a homogeneous thing, directly under 
the eye of a superior, intended to teach good manners 
and personal habits quite as much as the few easy 
lessons, for which often there were no text-books. The 
college life was lived in constant and close touch with 
the teacher, who knew every move of the pupil, unless 
the latter outwitted him. Under such circumstances 
there could be but little difference between the college 
community life and that of the college home. It was 
all a part of "college," which was considered as a tem- 
porary substitute for the parents' home, with all the re- 
strictions that there prevailed, but with some special 



The Student Life Department 63 

advantages in the way of education. It was this con- 
ception of the college which prompted the Massachu- 
setts legislature to confer upon the Harvard faculty the 
express authority to inflict corporal punishment upon 
their students.' 

Thus the faculty, under the direct provision of the 
statute law, was put in the place of the parent in one of 
the most characteristic functions of the home, that of 
the personal chastisement of the young. As the college 
was avowedly based upon the home, there could be no 
such differentiation of the different phases of under- 
graduate life as exists in the quasi college state of to-day. 

But we have never quite outlived this early notion of 
the American college. We sorrow for the old restraints 
upon the personal conduct of the students, but fail to 
study modern social and business conditions and evolve 
a modern method for accomplishing the same result. 
This failure has been one result of the utter omission 
of our colleges to organize a separate administrative 
department. 

Unfortunately, we still think of "college life" as a 
comparatively simple and homogeneous affair like that 
of the small boarding-school colleges of the ecclesias- 
tical period, where every effort was used to make the 
boys professing Christians, and, if possible, ministers 
of the gospel. Often nothing could now be further 
from the truth. The life of the average well-to-do or 
wealthy student is not one of laziness or idleness, any 
more than in the older days, but rather a round of un- 
controlled outside activities and temptations, of dis- 

' " Individual Training in Our Colleges," p. 8. 



64 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

tractions away from higher intellectual, moral or re- 
ligious things and often of lapses into evil ways. The 
college problem is still and must continue to be the 
problem of adolescents. So far as this comprehends 
the problems, mental, moral and physical, of a recog- 
nized life period it is true that the problem does not 
change. But so far as it deals with constantly shifting 
social, educational and other elements, the problem 
presents as constantly shifting phases, which must be 
as constantly anticipated and met with consummate 
wisdom. 

In one small college, the president recently estimated 
that the recognized student activities outside of the 
regular curriculum, and including sports, music, 
dramatics, etc., were at least twenty-seven in number. 
It is not surprising that the dean of another college has 
recommended "a lightening of nonacademic demands 
upon the students." There is a place for these outside 
activities which legitimately go far toward making a 
college education a training for efficient citizenship. 

Some of these outside activities belong, in the main, 
to the college community life, like the teams, crews, 
glee clubs, and other bodies which are presumed to 
represent the best that there is in the college in those 
lines; and some are social and properly confined to 
small groups of congenial spirits. In some lines of out- 
side activities the distinction between the college com-. 
munity and the home is easily seen, and in others it is 
not. The chief point to be remembered here is that 
the college community and home lives play as important 
a part as ever in molding the character of the future 



The Student Lije Department 65 

problem solver and citizen, but must be approached 
from a different angle and in a different spirit than in 
the earlier days. 

Now, as ever, the growth of the citizen is from his 
childhood in the home to his introduction into the 
business or community life, and thereafter into his 
political or civic life. He goes into business when he is 
from sixteen to twenty-five, but he does not often hold 
political office before he is thirty. These transitions 
are usually gradual and halting. The college age is 
likewise the age recognized as that in which a non- 
collegian is to take his first lessons in his trade or 
business, and form the habits which must govern his 
community or business life. We should recognize, there- 
fore, that these college years constitute a life period, a 
character-forming time, in which especially the com- 
munity life elements of the character of the future 
breadwinner are molded and largely set. This has 
always been so and must always be so, unless the race 
changes. Herein lies the great importance of the 
student life as distinguished from the pedagogical part 
of the college; for the embryo citizen and breadwinner 
may be more in need of training and growth in his com- 
munity or social or home life than upon his strictly 
intellectual side. 

The college community interests are those which are 
recognized as affecting the institution or the student 
body as a whole; while the college home interests are 
social in their nature and affect only individuals or 
small groups of students. 

We find that the student life, or the ninety per cent 



66 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

of his time outside of recitations, comprises that por- 
tion of the undergraduate's life in which he must do his 
studying, and get his food, rest, recreation and exer- 
cise, and is spent partly in the larger college atmosphere 
and activities which environ all within the institution, 
and partly in his closer association with his chosen 
comrades in his college home. Many feel that this 
ninety per cent is the really important part of a college 
education; that it is not his scholastic attainments, but 
his contact with his fellow-students in college and so- 
cial activities, which will make him a power in future 
years. No doubt this ninety per cent contributes much 
of that indefinite something which makes an all around 
man of the college graduate, and surely we should make 
every effort to lift it to the highest possible plane. This 
is because some men need the broadening of the college 
community or the polishing of the college home. But 
as reorganizers we must constantly hold in mind that 
most of the impurities and vices of college come from 
the student life rather than from personal contact with 
the instructors; and, therefore, that if we would put 
down these evils and improve physical, mental, moral 
and religious conditions we must do so chiefly in the 
great department of the student life, where these evils 
have their source and strength, and where, if anywhere, 
they must be overcome. 

Christ devotes over ninety per cent of His parable of 
the Sower and the Seed — ^not to either the sower or the 
seed — ^but to the soil into which the seed fell and to the 
relative failure of the harvest. He took for granted 
the goodness of the seed and the human frailty of the 



The Student Lije Department 67 

sower, but treated the ground as the variable yet reme- 
diable factor in the parable problem. In our colleges 
the seed typifies the slight contact of the student with 
his instructors — little else nowadays; the sower typi- 
fies the administration — what little there is of it — the 
agency which brings together the seed and the soil, the 
instructor and the pupil; while the student life largely 
determines whether the soil into which the seed falls 
shall be that by the wayside, or stony, or thorny, or be 
good ground. We, too, may safely assume the goodness 
of the seed, and the earnestness and devotion — but not 
the infallibility — of the sowers; and also that the average 
results of the harvest are relatively very poor; chiefly 
because we have forgotten the lesson of the parable, and 
have given most of our time and thought to the seed, 
and but little to the sowers ; while we have neglected to 
properly prepare the hearts and minds of our students 
by influences which act upon them after the seed is sown, 
or, in other words, when they are not in the presence of 
their instructors. It is with the mental, moral and re- 
ligious preparation of the ground that we are concerned 
when we study the student life department. 

The interest of the reorganized college in the college 
community life and in the home life of its pupils will be 
both direct and indirect. Direct as to that part of their 
time in which they must study and prepare for their 
recitations and other work with their professors; and 
indirect, that no part of their time shall be so spent as 
to unfit them to get the most, present and future, out of 
the opportunities which the college offers, or so as to 
affect her good name and fame in the present or future, 



68 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

or so that either college or pupil shall be derelict in 
their duties to the state. 

The vital importance of the student life department 
is seen in the following extract from a letter of the dean 
of one of the larger Western universities, a graduate of 
an important Eastern college: 

" I have also noted with great sorrow that in our Western 
institutions the evils of modern student life are even more 
sharply marked than they are in the East. The lack of the 
conservative element, the presence of a less highly organized 
society, the want of family prejudices to maintain old con- 
ditions, have all led to more extreme participation in mod- 
ern changes than the Eastern colleges have experienced. I 
know of no place where so much fine material coming from 
the country and small towns has been ruined by a single half 
year of idleness and extravagance. The worst elements of 
city, social and fraternity life seem to be those most eagerly 
grasped after and most incessantly followed." 

But surely, you say, the faculty knows all about this 
student life department in its dual relation to the 
undergraduate, and it has been the subject of their 
careful study for years. Strange to say quite the op- 
posite of this is true. Not only have the faculty not 
studied intelligently this plane of the college, but ap- 
parently they have not even fully recognized its existence 
or realized its tremendous bearing upon the results of 
their own work. 

They have been too content to study and to dis- 
course and write upon constitutional history and the 
political economy and affairs of the state and the city, 
but they have not analyzed the like conditions prevail- 
ing within their own walls, which palsied their own 
best efforts and too often proved a curse to some of 



The Student Life Department 69 

their brightest and most prominent students. Often- 
times they have not relaxed their efforts to work re- 
forms in what they were pleased to call the college, 
when they should have known that they were trying to 
deal with the evils of a single department of the college. 
The pedagogical department would not have exhibited 
this fatal blindness if a proper and separate administra- 
tive department had been at work on the problems 
which belonged to it rather than to any other depart- 
ment of the college. 

Now that nearly forty per cent of our entire popula- 
tion is in our cities, and an even greater proportion of 
our college students come from our urban population, 
we must expect an increasing predominance of city 
habits and manners, even in country colleges. This 
dwelling in cities means, among other things, that one's 
community or business life is touched by a large num- 
ber, but that it is neither usual nor polite to meddle in a 
fellow-citizen's home. This distinction is well marked 
in our colleges, especially in the larger urban institu- 
tions, and those without dormitories, and has been 
increasingly emphasized by the growth of clubs and 
fraternity houses. Nearness no longer implies neigh- 
borliness, even in college. Often students do not know 
the names or faces of many of their own classmates, for 
they do not meet them in class room or chapel, and 
merely pass them in the street or on the campus, or sit 
with them on the cheering benches. They ask that the 
privacy of their own college home life shall be respected, 
and they reciprocate by caring to know nothing of their 
fellows' home life. 



70 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

In this, also, there is a complete change from the 
earlier times. If there was then anything that his 
classmates did not know of a fellow-student's private 
affairs, it was because of his secretiveness ; but now it is 
because it is recognized that, under college good man- 
ners, it is none of the other fellow's business. Every 
year this view of the privacy of the college home be- 
comes better established in student circles, especially 
where the fraternities are strongest. The distinction 
between a man's college community life and his college 
home life is more and more marked each year, and this 
must come to be fully recognized by the college itself, 
which must appreciate that imdergraduates are no 
longer schoolboys, to be governed accordingly, but are 
adult citizens of the college community, and are to be 
treated accordingly. There is now often a tacit tolera- 
tion of many things in college which would have been 
impossible in earlier days. This is because there is no 
recognized and modern way of meeting the evils of this 
plane of the student's life. 

If this citizenship, with its different aspects and 
rights, had heretofore been properly recognized and 
studied by the colleges, they would long ago have seen 
that it was necessary to preserve a clean and sane 
college public sentiment if they would have clean and 
sane student lives or homes, and that when they lowered 
the general college sentiment they were guilty of a 
crime of the same nature as those who make grafting, 
or other civic wrongdoing, common, profitable and in 
a sense respectable. Yet that is just what the colleges 
themselves, in their haste for advertising and growth in 



The Student Life Department 71 

numbers and wealth, have done too often in their inter- 
collegiate athletics and in some other departments/ 

Yet this is no more surprising than the contem- 
poraneous lowering of scholarship standards in our 
colleges, so that they have actually put a premium on 
poor work/ 

Furthermore, we can see what have been the lower- 
ing but to-be-expected influences of this greedy and 
vicious policy upon the college home life. We rec- 
ognize the powerful and direct influence of the 
state and community, and of public sentiment and 
custom upon the home, and especially upon the youth 
therein. 

We also appreciate that men usually go wrong either 
in their community or home lives and not often in their 
direct relations to the state itself. Some men who are 
exemplary in their homes go wrong in their business 
lives, while others who are upright in business do 
grievous wrong in their home lives. 

It is from this point of view that we can best under- 
stand how, in the broad sense of the words, a man may 
be an "undesirable citizen." He may be undesirable 
because he breaks (a) the written law of the state and 
becomes amenable to its penalties; or (b) the unwritten 
law, or the contractual regulations, or the spirit of good 
faith and comity of his business or profession or com- 
munity; or (c) the moral or social law, in any of their 
phases, of his home or circle; or because he breaks the 
law in any two or more of these planes of his life. He 

» " Individual Training in Our Colleges," Chap. XXIII. 
'Ibid., Chap. XXV. 



72 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

may be undesirable — and extremely so — ^because, while 
he himself strictly observes the letter of the law, he con- 
stantly and designedly breaks its intent; or because he 
teaches or induces others to break the law, or shows 
them how they may do so, or so conducts himself as 
to bring the law into disrepute. He may hold high 
political office in the commonwealth, yet so use or mis- 
use that office, or neglect his opportunities therein, as 
to bring the law itself into disrepute and degrade the 
office, and hence be an undesirable citizen in his civic 
or political life. He may hold high office in a great 
and influential monied institution which guards and con- 
trols the fortunes and savings of thousands, and yet be 
essentially dishonest, dishonorable and overreaching, 
and hence an undesirable citizen in his community, 
business or professional life. He may hold high office 
in the church and exercise its chief functions, and lead 
an exemplary life, so far as outward appearances and 
the observances of the church are concerned, and yet 
be bigoted, uncharitable, cruel and hypocritical in his 
personal life; or he may break the spirit of the laws of 
the state or community or church while he observes the 
letter, and hence be an undesirable citizen. Judged by 
this standard, there are but few men who are not un- 
desirable or imperfect citizens in some manner and to 
some degree, either in their acts of omission or com- 
mission and in some one or more planes of their lives. 
At this point we can understand the full meaning of the 
injunction, "Judge not [any man in any particular 
plane of his life] that ye be not judged [in that or some 
other plane of your own life]. For with what judg- 



The Student Life Department 73 

ment ye judge [another, in any plane of his life, with 
that judgment] ye shall be judged [in the plane of your 
life wherein ye are weak and errant]." 

Here also we see the full scope of the duty of the 
college in training for citizenship each embryo citizen 
who has been intrusted to its care. That duty in its 
highest sense is to train, develop and make strong every 
element of desirable citizenship of which each under- 
graduate, as an individual, is capable, and to minimize 
or prevent the growth of every feature of his life which 
is likely to make him an undesirable citizen in any 
plane of his life in his future years. Anything short of 
this is pro tanto a failure, alike in ideals and results, 
upon the part of the institution itself and of its course. 
It is in this large sense that the term " training for citi- 
zenship" is used in this book. 

The reorganized college will clearly recognize the 
direct and all-powerful influence of the college state 
and of the college sentiment and atmosphere upon the 
college homes and their inmates, and thus upon the 
pedagogical results; and it will do all in its power to 
foster those influences which will improve that atmos- 
phere, and to counteract those which will vitiate it. In- 
deed it has been well said that a university is not a 
school but an atmosphere. 

Hence the reorganized college will perceive that its 
college community atmosphere has a great and domi- 
nating place in its economy; that it must be reckoned with 
if a perfect college reorganization is to be brought about; 
and that it must never be left out of future calculations; 
but that the college must attempt to regain at once, but 



74 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

wisely, the ground which it has lost in this regard during 
the last forty years. 

This college atmosphere is a delicate yet complex 
thing, and not exactly alike in any two institutions. It 
affects and is affected by the most diverse interests — ^by 
those of the locality in which it is situated, and of the 
state which supplies its funds in whole or in part, and 
of whose public-school system it may be the capstone; 
by the influences which its students bring from pre- 
paratory or other fitting schools or from their parents' 
homes; by the customs and ideals of rival institutions, 
as well as by those which have crystallized out of the 
college lives of generations of its own students; by the 
standards of its own faculty and of its own constituent 
college homes. At the same time it has its reflex action 
upon each of the elements which so strongly affect it. 
Is it too much to say that in our recent history the 
student life department and its relation to the whole 
subject of college education have not been intelligently 
examined and studied, and that this is another great 
reason why we must now have a radical reorganization, 
which shall recognize, coordinate and correlate this 
fundamental department? 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY LIFE — Continued 

The college community life forces itself upon our 
attention largely in connection with student govern- 
ment, and in intercollegiate contests which are usually 
in athletics; and these two phases of this subject de- 
mand careful thought. 

As a matter of fact, the real government of college 
affairs in most of our large institutions is by the stu- 
dents themselves, no matter how the faculty imagine 
that they still wield the power. 

The college owes it to the commonwealth, to itself 
and to its undergraduates that, so far as possible, the 
students shall be trained for future citizenship through 
participation in the government of the college state. 
Yet one college dean writes: 

"Student government implies the possession of mature 
judgment or control of reason more than most persons of 
college age possess. At that time of life all are more easily 
moved by impulse and immediate advantage. Experience 
alone teaches men to seek an ultimate effect in preference 
to a near-by vantage. The college life is in this respect a 
time of transition, often of revolution in attitude and action." 

It seems to me that this is the wrong point from which 
to view this subject. The college should be seeking 
ways in which to perform to the utmost its funda- 

75 



76 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

mental duty to train its citizens to perform fully and 
wisely their future duties as citizens of the greater 
state. Far better an honest and intelligent endeavor to 
train wisely its student citizens for future citizenship 
than the plea that they are still schoolboys incapable of 
self-government and to be governed by ancient college 
methods. But as a matter of fact real student govern- 
ment has usually been successful and is bound to be 
in most cases where it has a fair trial. It will be suc- 
cessful because it is the philosophically correct way of 
governing a modern college state. 

Apparently student government has not been tried 
with the distinct and avowed purpose of fulfilling the 
institution's own duty of training its students for citi- 
zenship and of giving them some idea of their future 
civic and political duties. Instead of treating student 
government as something to be encouraged and en- 
larged, it has been regarded as a doubtful and danger- 
ous substitute for the earlier faculty control of disci- 
pline, to be handled gingerly and grudgingly. Instead 
of making it an affirmative education, it has been 
treated as a negative concession wrung from a half- 
hearted faculty, who still cling to the idea that they are 
schoolmasters not mentors, and that discipline cannot 
be maintained except by some survival of the Puritanic 
college methods. Thus do the faculty detract from the 
dignity of their own standing, and prefer to remain 
proctors rather than be, in the highest and best sense, 
instructors; and thus does pedagogic control prevent 
the college from fully performing one great duty which 
it owes to the commonwealth. 



The College Community Life 'j'j 

There are many representative men in every college 
class who are fully qualified to bear the responsibility of 
a proper system of student government, and to be the 
better citizens in the future because of the load which 
they carried as students. Indeed, one of the striking 
things about modern college life is the amount of busi- 
ness, civic and financial responsibility, of one kind and 
another, which rests upon various students as managers, 
captains or otherwise, in connection with student 
activities. As a rule, these men, who are held directly 
accountable to their fellows and peers, do remarkably 
well and get much experience and knowledge which is 
valuable in their future touch with larger affairs. It 
also strikes a candid observer from the student stand- 
point that student government could not have much 
worse results than those which are laid herein, and in 
many other books upon the college, at the door of 
faculty government. 

In fact, faculty — not administrative or executive — 
management of the student life is almost as unphilo- 
sophical, and as detrimental to training for citizenship, 
as is student management of the instruction, an ex- 
ample of which can be found in unrestrained electives, 
against which an increasing cry is going up. This was 
to be expected, because a system of unregulated elec- 
tives is merely a means of turning over the pedagogical 
branch to the control of the individual student. 

At the beginning of the academic year of 1908-9, 
Columbia put into effect a Constitution of the Board of 
Student Representatives, approved by the University 
Council, April 21, 1908, a copy of which is given in 



78 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Appendix No. III. It is negative rather than affirma- 
tive, preventive rather than formative, but it is a step 
in the right direction. 

Likewise student honor ought to be a subject of 
student rather than of faculty regulation. The rules 
given below have been in force in Amherst College for 
several years, and have been successful because they 
have been backed by student sentiment, and they have 
reacted upon and improved every part of the college 
life. In all the cases where sentence under the honor 
system has been passed against fraternity members at 
Amherst, it has been anticipated or followed by sus- 
pension or expulsion by the student's own fraternity. 
But it is interesting to note that in one instance where 
such a member had been suspended by the local 
chapter he was, against the protest of the chapter, re- 
stored to membership by the general convention of the 
fraternity, which could not appreciate how cheating 
had come to be regarded at Amherst after it had been 
put under student control. 

Article I 

Section i . The honor system in examinations is defined 
as that system under which, after the examination is set by 
the faculty, no faculty surveillance is exercised, and under 
which the student body, through a committee, control in- 
vestigations concerning dishonesty in examinations. 

Sec. 2. The instructor may be present for a few mo- 
ments at the opening of the examination to answer any 
question that may arise. 

Sec. 3. During examinations each student shall have 
perfect freedom of action and conversation, provided he does 
not interfere with the work of others. 



The College Community Life 79 

Article II 

Sec. I. Each student must, in order to make his exam- 
ination valid, sign the following declaration: "I pledge my 
honor that I have neither given nor received aid in this ex- 
amination." A similar statement may be required in case 
of a written examination, essay or oration, but in case of no 
other work. 

Sec. 2. Violations of the honor system shall consist in any 
attempt to receive assistance from written or printed aids, 
or from any person or his paper; or any attempt to give as- 
sistance, whether the one so doing has completed his paper 
or not. This rule shall hold within and without the exam- 
ination room during the entire time in which the examination 
is in progress, that is, until the time specified has expired. 

Article III 

Sec. I. There shall be a committee consisting of six mem- 
bers who shall represent the student body and deal with all 
cases involving violations of the honor system. 

Sec. 2. The members of this committee shall be the pres- 
idents of the four classes and two others, one a member of 
the senior class and one a member of the junior class. 

Sec. 3. The president of the senior class shall be chairman 
of the committee, and the president of the junior class shall 
be clerk. 

Article IV 

Sec. I. In case of apparent fraud in examination, the de- 
tector shall first speak to the offending party. Should the 
offender show there is a mistake, the matter drops at once. 
Otherwise it is carried to the committee, who shall conduct 
a formal investigation and should the offender be found 
guilty he has the privilege of appeal to the faculty. In case 
of conviction the committee shall determine the punishment 
under the following regulations: 

I. In case of violation of the honor system by a member 
of the senior, junior or sophomore class, the penalty shall 
be a recommendation to the faculty of his separation from 
college. 



8o The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

2. In case of the violation of the said system by a member 
of the freshman class, the penalty shall be recommendation 
of suspension for a term determined by the committee. 

3. Five out of six votes shall in all cases be necessary for 
conviction. 

4. All men who have been in the college one (i) year or 
more shall be judged by the same rule as seniors, juniors and 
sophomores. Those who have been in the college for less 
than one (i) year shall be judged by the rule which applies 
to freshmen. 

Article V 

Sec. I. Every student in the college shall be expected to 
lend his aid in maintaining this constitution. 

Article VI 

Sec. I. This constitution may be amended by a three- 
fourths vote of those present at a mass meeting, notice hav- 
ing been given at least one week previous. 

Article VII 

Sec. I. The committee shall make provision for interpret- 
ing the honor system to the members of the freshman class 
within three weeks after the opening of the first term of each 
year. 

Sec. 2. This constitution shall be posted in lecture rooms, 
on college bulletin boards, and in the library. 

Sec. 3. This constitution shall be published in the Student 
three times each year, the first number of the first semester, 
the last number before the final examinations of the first 
semester, and the last number before the final examinations 
of the second semester. 

Evidently little progress has been made in student 
government. From articles in Religious Education for 
February, 1907, and February, 1908, it appears that 
this important agency of the college is practically unde- 
veloped. In a few cases student government has been 



The College Community Lije 8i 

pretty fairly and successfully tried. In far more in- 
stances a modified form of cooperation between stu- 
dents and faculty has been adopted. The experiment 
is usually viewed from the wrong point of view. There 
is a disinclination to swing from the parental form of 
government to the ideal of a self-governing community. 
It is far better to let the students be responsible for the 
regulation of their community affairs, even if they make 
many errors and failures, than to keep them in leading 
strings. The college claims to be training future citi- 
zens, but she treats them as boys. She can never do 
her whole duty to the state until she has worked out and 
applied a form of college polity which puts some civic 
duty for the college upon every student and makes him 
bear some of the burdens of college citizenship. The 
college should be in the highest sense an experiment 
station in citizenship. If the George Jr. Republic can 
be successful with wild boys under eighteen, surely the 
college community affairs ought to be safe in the hands 
of the students, for they will be largely under the con- 
trol of the most mature and sagacious seniors and 
juniors. Certainly the institution can never fulfill its 
duty to the commonwealth until it does its utmost to 
train citizens who shall be able and willing to exercise 
leadership in civic affairs in after years. 

But right here many colleges are evidently misap- 
prehending the distinction between the community and 
home lives of their citizens, and are apt to think that 
college government should extend to the students' per- 
sonal habits. These must be reached through the 
college homes. Even in the commonwealth prohibition 



82 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

and excise laws relate to the public trafficking in liquors 
and not to the private use of them in the home. The 
state does not make laws saying that the citizen shall 
not drink intoxicating liquors in his home, but merely 
regulates the manufacturing and public sale of those 
liquors. In all such matters the law only goes to the 
length of regulating trade, which is a function of the 
community life, and does not dictate what shall be the 
private habits of the individual, for that comes within 
the sanctity of his home life. It is not wise to regulate 
the use of tobacco and other personal habits by college 
law and ordinance. This weakens all government, be- 
cause it is an improper and unphilosophical assump- 
tion of authority by the central power. These things 
should be reached through the homes which, more 
than anything else, affect the personal habits of the 
individual. 

Let us, therefore, reorganize our colleges upon the 
theory that, so far as is possible, our embryo citizens 
are to be trained, during their course, in all that is high- 
est and best in citizenship, instead of being held in 
leading strings. If we are to make mistakes — and we 
have made and shall make many — let them be in the 
line of progress, rather than in that of ignorance and 
blindness; for an enlightened student government will 
solve many of the problems which now seem almost 
insurmountable. 

Intimately connected with student government in the 
college community life is the question of athletics and 
recreation; and in considering athletics we must not 
overlook the fact that college athletics are primarily for 



The College Community Life 83 

relaxation, recreation and health, and hence, indirectly, 
for better intellectual work in college and for greater 
efficiency in after life. We are too apt to think that 
they are for the honor and advertising of Alma Mater. 

We must also recognize that the physical education of 
the undergraduate, like the other branches of his college 
education, must regard his past, present and future, and 
must be founded upon a scientific knowledge of the 
actual and probable needs of the individual. Hence we 
should strive for at least the four following results in our 
system of physical education, and also we should at- 
tempt to make these clear to the undergraduate body 
so that college sentiment will aid us: 

(a) The ascertainment of the physical defects and 
shortcomings of each individual, and his development, 
so far as possible, into a well-rounded man physically. 

(b) The maintenance of a perfect physical condition 
for each student during these four years. 

(c) Since most of the students will, after college, live 
a sedentary life, a preparation for preserving perfect 
health under such untoward conditions. 

{d) The recreation which is a legitimate and even 
necessary end in any system of college or intercollegiate 
athletics, and in many instances the most important 
factor therein. If we can keep all of these desiderata 
before our minds, many things will appear simpler to 
us. Let us consider these objects more in detail. 

{a) The first thing essential is to know the true 
physical condition of each student, and this is much 
more important than we are apt to think. Many a boy 
athlete coming to college has, by overstraining, already 



84 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

sown the seeds of permanent ill health or of an early 
death, and special care must be exercised that these 
unfortunate results do not follow. There are dangers 
of the age of puberty in boys just as in girls. At this 
period of life the chief strength of the boy should be 
given to the readjustment of his physical nature, which 
may take two or three years. It is most dangerous at 
this time to attempt to put his heart to the strain of 
track races and other athletics which try the hearts 
even of well-developed adults. Many schoolboys, who 
have made wonderful athletic records at fourteen or 
sixteen years, have been laid on the shelf at nineteen 
or twenty; while, on the other hand, the best college 
athletes are often those who have had a normal growth 
during boyhood, and who have systematically taken up 
athletics only after they have finished school. The 
entering freshmen show the same difference in physical 
as in intellectual conditions. Hence we must first see 
to it that each man has the physical exercises that will 
develop in him, in a sane way, the best physique that is 
in him, to the end that he may be able to do his best 
for the state, himself and those dependent upon him in 
the future; that is, not to develop him into a prize 
winner, but into perfect manhood so far as may be. A 
compulsory course in boxing, fencing or dancing would 
have saved many a good student from becoming a 
pedant, or from being awkward and ungainly or pusil- 
lanimous, by developing in him the physical and social 
traits which he lacked and which he must get in college 
if ever; and thus would have made him a more efficient 
citizen in after years. 



The College Community Life 85 

(b) In some ways the life of a college student is not 
conducive to a perfect physical condition. Overstudy 
as well as overindulgence in social or other distractions 
may impair his health. Hence it must be an admitted 
aim of physical training in college to maintain all the 
students in the best of health, to the end that they may 
do the best possible work in their course and be started 
in their life work without physical handicap. 

(c) President Eliot was right when he recently said 
that football was a game that would not be used by the 
ordinary college graduate in after life. Unfortunately, 
the same is true of most other sports. Most graduates 
of college follow a sedentary life in after years. Physi- 
cal education in the colleges must be varied so as to 
teach some courses of resistance movements and other 
forms of home gymnastics which shall, later in life, be 
available for the busy lawyer, or clergyman or mer- 
chant, and through which he can preserve his health. 
Even as it is, our undergraduates learn from the pro- 
fessional coach or trainer many points as to hygiene and 
health which were utterly unknown a few years ago, and 
which are not a part of the curriculum of the college 
itself. But there should be a distinct recognition by the 
institution of the value of setting up exercises and of 
forms of gymnastics which can be used without ap- 
paratus in a graduate's room or office, and which thus 
shall serve as a preparation for the preservation of 
health after college. 

(d) Older men are apt to overlook the element of 
recreation which is and should be an important factor in 
the physical exercises of youth. There can and should 



86 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

be plenty of interest, fun, frolic and competition in 
college sports and games. So far as possible these 
exercises should be spontaneous and entertaining and 
not merely perfunctory. If a student works hard, he 
should play as well and in many cases play hard. In 
one sense the pendulum has, in modern times, swung 
clear away from the old-fashioned student who had all 
work and no play, to the point where the recreative side 
of college has been much overstimulated. We can have 
more intramural and a little less of intercollegiate con- 
tests; but, as reorganizers, let us not forget the value 
and necessity of true recreation in the life of a young 
man of from eighteen to twenty-two years of age. Thus 
our course of physical training will take account of the 
past, present and future of each student, and put into 
the life of each as much recreation as the other demands 
of the college will allow. 

But athletics and recreation belong largely to the 
college community Hfe and must be treated therein by 
the agencies which are effective therein, and that is 
chiefly by an enlightened college sentiment. This im- 
plies a proper attempt to make the student body under- 
stand what the college is striving to accomplish, and 
to educate college sentiment accordingly. The best 
course is likely to be a middle one between that pro- 
posed by the faculty and that demanded by the stu- 
dents; but the latter are entitled to be heard, since the 
controversy arises within the realm of the student life 
department. Ordinary expediency would suggest con- 
ciliation and agreement rather than force. This course 
will tend to improve conditions in the college state and 



The College Community Life 87 

make other reforms possible. Star chamber reforms 
in athletics, or in anything else within the realm of 
the student life, are unwise and unfair, and, therefore, 
likely to be ineffectual. The last thing that the faculty 
ought or needs to do in a well-organized institution is to 
outrage college sentiment, and show its power to en- 
force its rulings. Wherever a fair course with the 
undergraduate body has been honestly and impartially 
tried, it has been successful in direct ratio to the honesty 
and intelligence shown in its application. 

But it is quite within the province of the college to 
limit, if necessary, the undue interference of student 
activities with other college duties; as by limiting the 
number of intercollegiate contests, or of concerts, or 
trips for outside purposes which shall receive the col- 
lege approval. The college must also insist upon some 
oversight of the college home and some assurance that 
its atmosphere and influence shall be uplifting; but, 
as will be shown later, the real uplift in this respect 
must come from within the home and not through 
college regulations. When the college homes have been 
properly cleaned up, an enlightened public sentiment 
will follow as a matter of course. All this must be done 
in entire accord with the public sentiment of the college, 
rather than by arbitrary laws which have no college 
sentiment behind them. 

There should be connected with the administrative 
department of every college one or more men, of the 
very highest type, equipped along the lines suggested in 
a recent address by President Jesse of the University of 
Missouri : 



88 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

"It is a shame that every university — possibly some of 
them already do it — does not have on good salary one 
layman at least, with a head full of common sense, a heart 
full of righteousness, slightly connected with teaching, but 
really free for efforts to raise to the highest the life of the 
students. He ought to be capable of moving, like pawns on 
a chessboard, the Y. M. C. A., every local church, the fra- 
ternities, the University Club, the president, the deans, the 
teachers, the Athletic Association, and every power in the 
community. Such a man, giving a course of say three hours 
a week in ethics and the rest of his time to this work, could 
accomplish much. As his work grows, he ought to have 
assistants." 

This suggestion is in the right line, but it does not go 
far enough. It shows, however, that the proper way 
for the college government to reach the student life, 
either in the college community life or in the college 
home, is through "the power of a man" and not 
through the command of an ordinance. In the per- 
sonal and moral relations of the student citizens to each 
other and to their own homes, the college must keep 
close touch through the human agent rather than 
through the printed law. The college administration 
will provide and pay this human agent, but there must 
pervade the student body the feeling that this man is 
their friend, adviser, advocate and sympathizer, and 
the whole college government must respect and foster 
this confidential relation of their own representative to 
the students — singly and collectively. 

But this man — and many others of the same caliber 
and qualifications — ^will be distinctively in the adminis- 
trative and not in the instructional department, and will 
be far too busy and important to spend time in teaching. 



The College Community Life 89 

Our new administrative department will appreciate 
how important the college community life is in paying 
the institution's debts to the commonwealth, and to its 
own students and their parents, and to its own faculty 
and reputation. The college will strive constantly and 
earnestly to prepare itself to pay these debts by apply- 
ing to itself the very best administrative methods which 
other and ever larger public-service corporations adopt 
to enable them to pay the debts which they have as- 
sumed to the state, to their own employees and to those 
who depend upon these, and to their own stock- 
holders, creditors and confreres. 

The importance in the college economy of the col- 
lege community life, and of wisely managing it and the 
problems which it produces, will be even more evident 
after we have considered carefully the college home 
life, which touches and mingles with it at every point. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE COLLEGE HOME LIFE 

Let us still further contract our field of discussion of 
the student life, and consider that portion of this ninety 
per cent of the undergraduate's time which is spent, not 
on the campus, or in athletics, or in touch with the main 
student body, but in the close companionship of his 
intimates or the comparative seclusion of his college 
home, and which we shall call his college home or fam- 
ily life. 

A moment's thought will make us realize that a col- 
lege student must have some kind of home life dur- 
ing the four years which intervene between his parents' 
home and that in which he will be the breadwinner. If 
we had carefully thought out this dual nature of the 
student life we should long ago have perceived that 
many things in college, which we loosely think of as 
social, belong in fact to the home life. We should not 
confuse the social and home factors in any instance. 
The college home life may be dwarfed, hidden, almost 
unrecognizable — but it will be there. It may be spent 
in luxury or penury; in a dormitory, in a village or city 
boarding place, or in a fraternity house; it may be 
harmful, helpful or neutral — but it will be there, and 
essentially like any other home life in its nature and 



The College Home Life 91 

effects, and in the manner in which it can be affected 
and molded for better or worse. 

In influence and effect it closely resembles the stu- 
dent's boyhood home, for it largely determines, possibly 
throughout life, the purity or impurity of his thoughts, 
habits and language; his personal power over his fellow- 
men, or, in college phrase, his ability as a "mixer"; his 
intellectual and moral attainments ; and his readiness to 
receive and assimilate religious impressions. In other 
words, it affects, in every plane, his life as a citizen in 
college and in after years. 

There is this strictly home life for every college 
student which in large part decides the character of 
the soil into which the good seed shall fall — especially 
when the seed is moral or religious in character — and 
this home life is where the earlier good influences of 
the parents' home are most frequently undone and de- 
stroyed and the seeds of moral decay are sown. It will 
often depend upon his college home life whether the 
student is open to the higher religious and moral lessons 
which cannot usually be impressed in the modern class 
room or lecture, but which must come, if they come at 
all, through other agencies. 

One great cause for the falling off of candidates for 
the ministry will be found in the neglect of the college 
home life of the young men who leave their parents' 
homes with high religious ideals and purposes, but who 
are soon diverted from any high aims by the noxious 
atmosphere of their college homes. This part of the 
institution must be purified and uplifted, or else most 
religious instruction and power will be largely wasted — 



92 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

and through our own shortsightedness. The home is 
the great foundation for widespread and continuing re- 
ligious growth, and this is true in regard to the college 
home. 

If, then, we are to hope to make any radical, con- 
tinuing and widespread improvement in college moral 
and religious conditions, we must begin in the lives of 
the college homes, which the institution itself can never 
greatly influence, because as a quasi state it cannot in- 
terfere in the ordinary affairs of the home, and because 
interference from without in siuch affairs is usually re- 
sented and seldom helpful. The college can perma- 
nently and wisely affect the life of its homes chiefly 
through its human agents and their personal influence 
for good with those who from time to time govern or 
are responsible for the home's life. 

The influence of the personal character of the teacher, 
which we should never lose, will come through his 
manhood working on the manhood of others, and not 
through his teaching or learning as such. But the soil 
of the home life must be kept open and rich chiefly 
through the personal influence and example of those 
who are in touch with it daily and hourly, and who 
know it through and through. Here the college is on 
solid ground. 

This college home life must be affirmatively enno- 
bling and uplifting or it will be quite the contrary. It 
must be constantly affected by strong and usually older 
characters, whose influence must be exerted, silently but 
surely, within itself. It must have a power for good, 
inherent in itself, and must not expect to find any true 



The College Home Life 93 

substitute for this in some mystic influences that the 
college, or Y. M. C. A., or any other extrinsic agency, 
institutional in its nature, can exercise from without. 
Our tendency is to look to institutions and organizations 
to do those things which can be accomplished only by 
ourselves. These outside agencies are artificial creatures 
which may stimulate and inspire, but which can never 
supplant the normal home force. 

As no state, community or institution can or should 
usurp our place as parents in our own home, so neither 
the college nor the faculty as a body, especially in the 
large universities, should be expected to control directly 
the college home lives of the students, for they can never 
take the place of an inherent and osmotic force working 
from within — in the absence of which there can be no 
true home. 

But this force must be permanent — not shifting from 
year to year. It must have real authority — even if it 
uses only moral suasion. It must rule by the consent 
of the governed and because they appreciate that it 
works for their best good. It must have power away 
from the home as well as within its walls — and follow 
the student, even to the strange city, and everywhere 
nerve him against the terrible temptations which con- 
stantly beset him. Whether it be good, bad or in- 
different, there is such a moral force at work in every 
college home. Except as this force is ennobled we can- 
not hope for permanent religious or moral improvement 
among our students; and it must be ennobled by human 
example and sympathy and not by institutional or- 
dinance. In this respect the college home of the young 



94 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

student resembles the boarding schools of which Dr. 
Endicott Peabody, head master of the Groton School, 
says: 

"They [boarding schools] are likely to become very bad if 
they are not positively good, for boys are great missionaries 
for good or for evil. And so you must get the older boys 
interested in the school. They must be so led as to really 
care for its best life, and to see that they are only loyal to the 
school when they are serving its higher interests. In this 
way the community can be made thoroughly — thoroughly — 
wholesome, and it will not be a "Fool's Paradise," as some 
of our institutions are, but a place in which it is a delight 
and inspiration to live." 

We have spent much thought and money upon the 
pedagogical departments of our colleges, but very, very 
little in studying the college home life. Yet this is not 
the least important of the college departments, since it 
largely determines the effectiveness of the others upon 
individual students. It was the most important in our 
forefathers' eyes, for they saw that only through it 
could they prepare the good ground for the good seed 
and make good citizens. We are blameworthy if, while 
improving the seed and the sowers, we have neglected 
the preparation of the soil. We must bend every energy 
to restore the college home life to its proper relative 
place in the college economy and coordinate it with the 
other factors therein. 

The forefathers were right in believing that this good- 
ness of the ground could be secured only through the 
direct and intimate touch of the older man upon the 
younger. But how, in our large institutions and under 
modern conditions, are we to bring about a close touch 



The College Home Life 95 

between the students and older men which shall con- 
stantly uplift the younger men in their college family 
lives? Is there any agency through which this is being 
or can be done? Or anything to indicate that up to the 
present time only one such agency has been developed 
in a large way? If, under modern conditions, there has 
been any distinct and widespread growth and develop- 
ment of the college home, we should study it most care- 
fully and with an open mind, and, if possible, seek by 
it to improve the soil in which we are fruitlessly sowing 
so much good seed, and use it as a model for building 
up other helpful homes which shall embrace every stu- 
dent. 



CHAPTER X 

THE GREEK-LETTER FRATERNITIES AND THE 
COLLEGE HOME 

At first the Greek-letter fraternities were mere college 
secret societies. In their second stage they became 
social bodies, with a secret lodge room and lodge night, 
but with few other cohesive factors within the chapter 
itself or between the various chapters. In their present 
and third period they have developed into home-build- 
ing agencies, wherein many rich and influential alumni 
and earnest and energetic undergraduates are laboring 
together to erect college homes, and thereby solve to a 
limited extent the modern problems in the home life 
arising out of increasing numbers and changed dormi- 
tory and social conditions. 

As we look back we can perceive how inevitable it 
was that, as fast and as far as the college ceased to pro- 
vide true college homes, the students and alumni must 
provide substitutes; and for this the fraternities fur- 
nished the natural instrumentality, for they were in 
close touch with many rich and influential alumni, and 
were such keen rivals that each was sure to copy any 
such radical step in advance as the building of chapter 
houses. The only home controlled by the college 
which at all resembles that of the older institutions now 
survives in a few of the women's colleges with their 

96 



The Fraternities and the College Home 97 

small and separate dormitory houses, where many of 
the students room and eat. But all the women in these 
institutions comprise less than three per cent of our 
college and university students, and therefore the few 
dormitory houses which they possess house even a 
smaller percentage of the total college membership. 
As to the rest of the students (ninety-seven per cent), 
the tendency as to college homes has been decidedly in 
an opposite direction. The state colleges and univer- 
sities contain more than one half of all the students ' 
and their enrollment is increasing at about twice the 
rate of that of the private institutions {ante, p. 8). But 
the state universities, following the German custom for 
the most part, have provided practically no dormi- 
tories, but have relegated their students to the execrable 
boarding houses of a typical college town. One state 
university president writes: 

"We have a strong feeling in a university town like this, 
where there are 2,300 students in a town of 10,000, that we 
can maintain the home life of students by really dissemi- 
nating them in homes. We find, however, that there is a 
tendency to boarding houses and distressingly poor living, 
hence our movement looking toward the commons with cer- 
tain dormitory privileges. The fraternities are aiding us by 
having their own homes. We are now tending toward the 
erection of a commons social headquarters, and with some 
dormitory privileges. It is estimated that the universities 
by furnishing lodging to not exceed twenty-five per cent of 
their students may be able to regulate the sanitary and moral 
accommodations in the homes that are open to students." 

In the very mail which brought this letter I received 
a college paper in which an undergraduate wrote of 

' " Individual Training in Our Colleges," p. 138. 



98 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

"the homeless waifs of this dormitory -scarce college," 
although twenty per cent of his fellows were housed in 
the ancient college dormitories and almost fifty per 
cent in fraternity houses. 

How such a letter illumines the growth of the Greek- 
letter fraternity homes. What is there homelike or 
home-making about the average cheap boarding house 
of a college town. On the contrary, for the student its 
tendency is rather "to drive him to drink," or some- 
thing worse. The above letter, written in 1908, shows 
how the college must be looking backward when it 
has "a strong feeling" that a country town of 10,000 
inhabitants (and even the very best university town, as 
that one undoubtedly was) can possibly furnish uplift- 
ing and ennobling homes for one quarter as many stu- 
dents. Is it any wonder that beautiful and attractive 
fraternity houses have multipUed when the colleges have 
avowedly pursued the policy of making a boarding 
house in a college town the best home that the institu- 
tions themselves can oflfer? Modern dormitories repre- 
sent a permanent investment of from $500 to $2,000 for 
every student housed; and for some of the fraternity 
houses even more, for they contain beautiful living 
rooms, dining rooms and kitchens, in addition to the 
studies and sleeping rooms. That is, a modern dormi- 
tory to house 100 students costs from $100,000 to $200,- 
000, or even more. Is there any wonder that the colleges 
have been perfectly willing to allow their alumni to put 
up fraternity houses at large cost, thus enabling the insti- 
tutions to put their capital into other things ? Is it not 
plainly evident why the fraternities have grown apace? 



The Fraternities and the College Home 99 

The growth of fraternity houses has changed the 
center of gravity of the student body. Formerly the 
college homes of the strong upper classmen were in the 
dormitories and the under classmen roomed outside if 
necessary. Now in many colleges the dormitories house 
the freshmen, while the fraternity buildings are the col- 
lege homes of the influential upper classmen, and thus 
the center of student sentiment — at least in the East 
and Middle West. 

We continue to regard the fraternities as mere secret 
societies, and hence to give undue significance to their 
secret features, failing to realize how much more im- 
portant are their home features; and that it is chiefly 
through improving the atmosphere of these homes — 
not because they are fraternity houses, but because they 
are the only typical and distinctive homes of the ordinary 
college, and the homes for four years of many of its 
most influential students — that we can hope for better 
moral and religious results among our undergraduates. 

It needs no prophetic eye to see that the fraternities 
will soon fully enter upon their fourth or endowment 
period in which, their home-building substantially fin- 
ished, the wealth and energies of each college home, or 
series of homes, will be turned to establishing endow- 
ments for improving and conserving the higher home- 
making and educational functions of the fraternity. 
Already this movement is under way. Each home 
built and paid for is in the nature of an endowment. 
The spread of this movement has been wonderful 
and inevitable. There are about 370 colleges and 
universities which contain chapters of some frater- 



loo The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

nities, and in many of these institutions the houses 
of the fraternities are among the finest in the town. 
Millions of dollars have been thus invested. For ex- 
ample, the properties of the eleven fraternities at Am- 
herst are worth more than twenty times the amount of 
Yale's available funds in 1830; and the properties of ten 
fraternities at Columbia equal in value the total pro- 
ductive funds of all the colleges at the beginning of the 
last century. Since the older private institutions have 
thus come, more and more, to depend upon the fra- 
ternities for housing space, and merely get along with 
patching up their ancient barnlike dormitories, and 
the state universities have avowedly pursued the course 
of not having any dormitories at all, it is not difficult to 
see why the fraternity home is now the typical college 
home, and in many cases the best type of home in any 
particular college. 

But in the fraternities, which are largely responsible 
for the ninety per cent of the student life of their mem- 
bers, there is the same lack of administrative care which 
we shall find to exist in the colleges. Their alumni 
must be made to understand this, and to appreciate that, 
so long as they maintain these homes, they are respon- 
sible for each and every one of them, and for the home 
life of each and every imdergraduate member therein. 
The alumni, working from within — and not the college 
working from without — but with the active assistance 
of the college authorities, must keep these homes clean. 
These centers are no longer the field in which the college 
state must exercise its home-making functions. These 
have passed to the owners and proprietors of the several 



The Fraternities and the College Home loi 

homes, but the college has the clear right to demand that 
the owners shall keep their several homes so that they 
shall be a positive aid to the college work. 

One old and influential fraternity is annually spend- 
ing thousands of dollars to secure the wise direction 
and constant personal touch in its lodges and among 
its alumni of a permanent and uniquely equipped field 
secretary, who seeks to insure that only the best fitted 
freshmen are admitted, and that throughout their course 
these students shall be in constant and close touch in 
their college home lives with strong and earnest alumni 
who are personally and intimately acquainted with each 
undergraduate, and who, through a long series of years, 
come to exert an uplifting educational .and moral power 
from within the lodge which must greatly increase the 
likelihood that the good seed will fall into good ground. 
This is no longer an experiment. After four years of 
such work this fraternity can measure up some of the 
direct educational results from its endeavors to hold 
itself strictly accountable for the intellectual and moral 
conditions of its own college homes. It finds its num- 
bers greater than ever before, and that its percentage of 
loss of active members from every cause is less than 
twenty per cent of the average loss of the colleges in 
which it has chapters, and that its loss from poor 
scholarship is even smaller. It finds that one half its 
chapters, with one half its total membership, did not 
lose a single man during the first half of the last college 
year, and that a very large proportion of its apparent 
losses have been offset by the men who, through its in- 
fluence, returned to college and finished their courses. 



I02 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Yet the undergraduate members of this fraternity are 
probably on an average as wealthy and as active socially 
as those of any other. The constant touch of the local 
alumni, under the lead of an organized administration, 
has shown what a fraternity is capable of doing in the 
college lives of its undergraduates. 

As this book proposes fraternity and college reorgani- 
zation upon a strictly business basis, and largely through 
their business alumni, it is not improper thus to refer to 
the success which has already followed this initial ex- 
periment of fraternity reorganization by business and 
professional alumni along modern administrative lines. 
This experiment has demonstrated beyond cavil that, 
entirely without pedagogical initiation or supervision, 
there is an inherent power in the fraternity alumni to 
make their home in any particular college community 
stand for the best that such a home should stand for in 
any community ; that often the chief obstacles to enno- 
bling a fraternity home are the debasing influences of the 
atmosphere of the college community life; and that not- 
withstanding the steady downpull of the college com- 
munity, but not without a great cost of thought and 
care, the college home can be so kept that it is inspiring 
intellectually and morally. Q. E. D. A successful ex- 
periment under normal conditions and with ordinary 
agencies is worth a hundred theories, and this is what 
is offered to the alumni of other fraternities as a demon- 
stration of what they, too, can accomplish. 

If anyone doubts the assertions of this book in relation 
to the general student life and the college homes and 
their place in training the future citizen and in rounding 



The Fraternities and the College Home 103 

out the work of the college instructor, let him assume 
the position of field secretary in a good fraternity, and 
learn what a load he must carry on his heart and mind 
when he attempts to raise his own fraternity homes 
against the steady downdrag of the student life, es- 
pecially where he has to deal with students who have 
plenty of money, or too much for their real good. Or 
let the thoughtful alumnus learn from such an un- 
doubted expert in student life the true conditions which 
prevail in the majority of the homes of his own Alma 
Mater, and he will begin to realize what proportions the 
home life department assumes in the mind of one who 
thoroughly investigates these conditions in order to pro- 
pose reorganization along strictly business lines. When 
he sees the influences Which he must meet, he will un- 
derstand that the college is not equipped to do this 
work unaided, and must avail itself of every possible 
help. 

To such an investigator home-making will mean far 
more than home-building. The home-building is but a 
matter of dollars, and bricks and mortar, but the home- 
making is character-building — with all which that im- 
plies — in and upon the graduate and undergraduate 
factors which are necessary to a good college home. 

I have a deep-rooted conviction that what one fra- 
ternity can do, has done, and is doing, other fraternities 
can do if they will but consciously pass from their home- 
building to their home-making periods. Earnest talks 
with earnest alumni of other fraternities convince me 
that the time is ripe for this great forward movement 
among the alumni of our colleges, and that the fullest 



I04 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

and most cordial cooperation among the college homes 
and those who in the larger sense have charge of them 
must be one of the first steps forward toward a business 
reorganization. This feeling of direct responsibility for 
the college family lives of their undergraduate brothers 
is increasingly abroad in all the fraternities and will 
soon work out great results, and already most fraterni- 
ties have partially endowed some portions of their work. 

The sectarianism of the churches was weakened when 
Sabbath schools were formed and the lay workers in 
these broke over church lines and united in laboring for 
the young. Panhellenism will come, but not until the 
alumni workers in each fraternity fully organize as home- 
makers, and thus are made to realize that cooperation 
and not isolation will solve the problems which are 
common to all, for they are merely the common problems 
of the college home. 

I wish to bear most cordial witness to the very strong 
feeling which I find among the leading alumni of sister 
fraternities as to their duties in regard to their under- 
graduates. This has not yet fully crystallized, but it is 
coming fast and will take form almost before we know 
it. I believe that the fraternities will do their splendid 
part in the great college reorganization — which must 
soon come — far more quickly and thoroughly than the 
majority of the colleges will do theirs. Our fraternities 
are still absorbed with their home-building, but will 
speedily assume and wisely exercise the home-making 
functions which, in her evolution into a quasi state, 
have logically and necessarily fallen from Alma Mater's 
hands. 



The Fraternities and the College Home 105 

No patent is claimed for the conception that strong, 
clean alumni, acting permanently within their fraternity 
home, work powerfully for a better life therein. This 
has always been so — and would be in any home. But 
there is plainly in sight an advance movement to sys- 
tematically organize, develop and endow the fraternity 
as a home-making force, and such a movement, with 
our most influential alumni behind it, will be sure 
of success. A thoughtful student of modern under- 
graduate conditions must realize that our fraternities 
furnish the only broad and effective means so far de- 
veloped and now available for permanently reaching 
the college home lives of any considerable number of 
students in any considerable number of institutions. 
No other home-building or home-making force is now 
at work among our American colleges in a large way 
and along well-defined and philosophically correct lines. 

Furthermore, in the nonfraternity colleges there is no 
similar agency whereby the alumni are systematically 
put in touch with the family lives of the undergraduates. 
I have discussed with the college authorities, alumni 
and undergraduates of the leading nonfraternity col- 
leges the relations of their graduates to the under- 
graduates in the college home plane, and have found 
that, almost without exception, there was not even a 
conception of close cooperation between the alumni 
and students such as prevails in a good fraternity chap- 
ter. In the leading nonfraternity university it was 
baldly put by an undergraduate as follows : 

"The alumni are back numbers, and if they do not 
mind their own business we will make them do so. We 



io6 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

have no use for them, except to help us out in athletics." 
Leading alumni have assured me that this is the proper 
attitude, and instructors who had come from fraternity 
colleges have repeatedly told me that they had been 
shocked to find that these words correctly expressed the 
sentiments with which the alumni were regarded by the 
undergraduates in that university. Up to the present 
time there is no agency in the nonfraternity college 
through which the influence of the alumni can be per- 
manently and surely exerted in the college home. 

It is not a question of the fraternity or nonfraternity 
home, as we superficially think. It is ever and always 
the question of the college home life for every under- 
graduate, whether a fraternity member or not. Fur- 
thermore, it is the question of whether we have failed to 
give due thought to one of the great departments of our 
colleges, and whether this is not another unanswerable 
argument for a college reorganization upon business 
principles. On every side I am met by the assurances 
of the best workers among our students that the college 
authorities and faculty cannot, unaided, solve the prob- 
lems which arise in the student life department. This 
is clearly stated in the following letter from President 
Harry Pratt Judson, of Chicago University: 

"There is no doubt that in any college the general social 
and moral conditions are almost wholly beyond faculty con- 
trol. Overt acts can be dealt with by quasi legal processes. 
These, however, like many governmental remedies, do not 
go beyond the surface. The evils which exist are undoubted. 
They can be reached only outside the faculty and by agencies 
which come in immediate social contact with student 
life. ... Of course a university like ours is under condi- 



The Fraternities and the College Home 107 

tions quite different from those attending an institution which 
is primarily a college. Most of our students are graduates 
of college, and are engaged in advanced research and pro- 
fessional work. At the same time, while this modifies the 
general social conditions, the essentials are left untouched. 
Financial organization of our institutions of learning may 
easily be made businesslike; faculty organization, so far as 
instruction is concerned, may easily be made adequate; those 
agencies which deal with social, moral or spiritual life, 
however, have to do with far more elusive qualities, and 
the result is that the organization thus far effected in those 
lines is entirely inadequate. This is to my mind the great 
problem which should now be handled by college adminis- 
trators." 

President Schurman, of Cornell, in a recent annual 
report, says: 

"While the intellectual and scholarly spirit and organ- 
ization are on a high plane, the social life leaves much to be 
desired. The great majority of the young men — all except 
those in fraternities — are scattered in boarding and lodging 
houses throughout the city. The experience of American 
students seems to show that the fraternity house, accom- 
modating two or three dozen students, presents in the matter 
of size and arrangement an ideal for the residential hall; 
it is large enough for a community and not too large for 
intimate acquaintance and friendship; it provides studies, 
bed-rooms, bathrooms, kitchen, dining-room and commons 
room." 

When one speaks favorably of the part which the 
fraternities have played and can play in solving a por- 
tion of the college home life problem, he is continually 
met with the suggestion, " But that does not provide for 
the nonfraternity men." This is true and lamentable, 
but it is an arraignment of the colleges and not of the 
fraternities, and merely proves that substantially all the 
progress so far made toward a wide solution of the 



io8 The Reorganization o} Our Colleges 

college home problem has been made by the fraternities 
and not by the colleges. College dormitories, whether 
with or without commons, are usually barracks, and not 
homes in the true sense, and are simply a barracks form 
of solving the college home life problem. It must be 
conceded, therefore, that the question of homes for the 
nonfraternity men is merely that portion of the institu- 
tion's own problem — of providing and governing homes 
for all its students — which the fraternities have not 
solved for it; and that it is what the fraternities have 
done which has thrown into bold relief this failure of 
the colleges to do anything! 

The question "How do you provide for the nonfra- 
ternity members?" leaves the position of the colleges 
about as follows: "We have felt compelled to give up 
building dormitories. We have quite overlooked the 
inherent difference between a college home and a room 
somewhere in a college town. We have considered our 
duty done if our students could find some shelter under 
the roofs of the college village or town, which expects, 
somehow or other, to get its chief living out of the 
college students, for the students' trade is its most 
important asset.' Suddenly we realize that the fra- 
ternities have acquired a monopoly of the homes and 
the college of the barracks; and that it is the social and 
other features of the home which the nonfraternity 
members are clamoring for, and which make them en- 
vious of the fraternity members. For instead of de- 

' In one state university town this has been found to aggregate at 
least $600,000 a year, which is five per cent on $12,000,000, although 
the total endowment of the university in question was less than 
$3,000,000. 



The Fraternities and the College Home 109 

pending upon the college, some of the undergraduates, 
with the financial aid of the alumni, have erected beau- 
tiful homes, and thereby have made even more apparent 
the failure of the institution to provide for any true form 
of college home life. Since then the fraternities have 
solved this problem in part, and thereby have made the 
college failure more evident, it is the duty of the fra- 
ternities (on the ground that one good turn deserves 
another!) to go on and solve the remainder of this 
problem of the college or to show the institution how it 
can itself do this." In other words, it is not an edifice 
but the associations of a home which the nonfraternity 
men crave. They know that the brotherhood of the 
fraternity is a living force which extends to every phase 
of life, and it is this personal and vital interest in the 
individual which each man hungers for, and which now- 
adays few get except in the fraternity homes. 

Too often the fraternities are the only factors by 
which at present the college course can round out the 
social and home sides of its training of the future citi- 
zen. The assistance which the fraternities have rendered 
to the college in performing this portion of its duty to 
the commonwealth must not be overlooked or sneered 
at. In this regard the question is not as to whether the 
fraternities have done their part well, or as well as the 
colleges used to do, but rather whether the colleges have 
done anything at all. If, then, the college home con- 
ditions have become bad it has not been primarily the 
fault of the fraternities, but rather because the institu- 
tions have done substantially nothing, and have not 
even given the subject any intelligent study. 



no The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

The president of a splendid institution, with excep- 
tional advantages and unexceptional local conditions 
and atmosphere, and where there are no fraternities, 
writes as follows: 

"Aren't you misunderstanding the rooming and board- 
ing situation, especially in coeducational colleges? Here, 
for example, almost none of the men board by themselves. 
They have their meals with the young women at the college 
boarding houses, and at other private houses through the 
town, where the conditions, if not ideal, are certainly noth- 
ing like what they often become in clubs where men eat 
by themselves. And I think you very much underestimate, 
also, the very reasonable provision that is made for the men 
scattered through the homes of a community like ours. I 
am inclined to think here that the experience of the chil- 
dren's aid societies — that almost any home is better than 
the best institution — holds in no small measure for students 
also, and that the human relations in which the three or four 
or five students come to the family in whose house they are 
rooming are not without their value and wholesome influ- 
ence in the life of the students. I have myself doubted 
very much, so far as our experience here has gone, whether 
we should not lose rather than gain by the substitution of 
men's dormitories for the rooming in private houses; and I 
have never felt like urging the putting of much college 
money in this direction." 

Probably not five per cent of our students are under 
local conditions or under strong religious influences re- 
sembling those which prevail in this particular insti- 
tution. In other places the scattering of the students 
through an urban population of low morals has had 
such disastrous effects that the authorities have been 
forced to attempt to get all undergraduates on to the 
campus or into fraternity houses. But it is important 
to note, that, even in this instance of a nonfraternity 



The Fraternities and the College Home iii 

college, it is the "human relations" which are felt to be 
the great thing. It is "the human relations" which 
the fraternity members get and which the nonfraternity 
undergraduates hunger for, and which are chiefly in the 
minds of those who ask: "But how do you provide for 
the nonfraternity men?" 

It is not easy to discuss nonfraternity conditions 
from the standpoint of the fraternities, for at least the 
latter have accomplished something, both in the way 
of home-building and home-making. They have made 
many and sad failures and mistakes, but at least they 
have made a record. For the nonfraternity men very 
little has been done, even by the colleges; and the col- 
leges have no record or account to which, like that 
of the fraternities, we may append "E, and O. E.," 
"errors and omissions excepted." The history of the 
college failure in recent years in regard to the college 
home is so largely made up of errors and omissions that 
if these should be excepted there would be little left. 
But surely this failure of the colleges gives them no 
right to find fault with what the fraternities have ac- 
complished of their own accord, and often against the 
opposition of the college itself. 

A friend, who was a nonfraternity man not from 
necessity but out of respect for his father's prejudices, 
but who thoroughly believes in the fraternities, asks me 
to suggest "some home life for the nonfraternity men, 
and some remedy for their helpless and hopeless con- 
dition, sans parents, faculty care, or any saving grace of 
upper class or alumni supervision." Probably there are 
many to whom this language seems too strong, but it 



112 The Reorganization of Our College^ 

expresses the thoughts which I have heard voiced many 
times in colleges where the fraternities are strong. 

My suggestions for supplying these "human rela- 
tions" for the nonfraternity men will be found in 
Chapter XXXII. 

It is at this point that we may see why the fraternities 
are charged with being exclusive and undemocratic. 
Certainly they do, so far as they can, attempt to train 
their members in social etiquette and polished manners, 
and thus make them men of the world, and round out 
the home and social sides of their characters; but the 
college no longer does anything of this kind directly. 
The advantages thus evidently given by the fraternities 
are unjustly laid up against them, instead of being 
charged to their credit and against the colleges them- 
selves, which should at least attempt, in an intelligent 
manner, to provide for the nonfraternity men some of 
the same kind of training which is given in the homes 
of the fraternities. This was made very clear to me in 
an earnest conversation with a well-known professor 
who had put himself through a nonfraternity college, 
but whose younger brothers had gone through another 
college in which they became prominent members of 
fraternities. I found that his complaint was based 
upon the fact that the fraternities gave social training 
in polite accomplishments to those who needed them 
least, having previously had them at home; but that 
they did not, nor did the college, give this training to the 
nonfraternity men who were usually most in need of it. 
But a little discussion made the professor admit that 
this was in fact a potent argument in favor of the fra- 



The Fraternities and the College Home 113 

ternity and against the college. The former, by in- 
telligently and effectively exercising its home- making 
functions, was not preventing the latter from doing the 
same thing in some manner; but, on the contrary, was 
showing it, very strikingly, how it could be done and 
thus that it needed to be done. On the other hand 
too many, like the professor just mentioned, are finding 
fault with the only agency in the college which is in- 
telligently exercising these earlier home-making func- 
tions of Alma Mater, instead of arousing that dear old 
woman to provide stepmothers if she can no longer 
attend in person to her students' good manners. This 
mistaken point of view lies at the bottom of many of the 
complaints against the fraternities. They are unjustly 
accused of being undemocratic, aristocratic and exclu- 
sive, merely because, in the privacy of well-kept homes, 
they do well their own home- making work, and thus 
make clear Alma Mater's failure either to round out 
this side of the characters of the nonfraternity men or 
to provide a substitute to carry on this work, although 
the nonfraternity men undoubtedly need it more than 
the average fraternity member. The complaint is an 
eminently just one, but against the wrong party. Judg- 
ment should be ordered for the respondents and against 
the complainants, with heavy costs. 

It is clearly evident, therefore, that the enormous 
growth of the fraternity homes has not been fortuitous. 
The fraternities, in their present shape, have grown 
out of the need for a new form of college family life; 
they have in part supplied such need, and thereby have 
directed attention to it; but they have not created the 



114 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

need, and, like other homes, they are largely limited, in 
supplying that need, to the good they can do within 
their own doors and to the example which they can set 
to those without. In our review of the history of college 
administrative conditions we shall find many proofs of 
low college ideals, practice and methods. But it is sur- 
prising that the clergymen and other clean men of our 
college faculties should not have studied and under- 
stood this attempt of the undergraduates to find sub- 
stitutes for the earlier dormitory homes, and should not 
have deemed it a sacred duty to join intelligently with 
the home-building forces of the fraternities to insure 
that these homes, which are the great foundation of the 
student life, should be kept pure and ennobling. Yet 
such is plainly the case. Here again, with no proper 
administrative department to study their problems, our 
institutions have been looking backward, and have not 
understood how the college secret society was develop- 
ing into the college home; nor have they perceived that 
the fraternities could solve only a small portion of this 
home problem, and that the college itself must do the 
rest. Some of the terrible results, during the past thirty 
years, of this fatal and unexplainable blindness will be- 
come clear as we study the vices engendered and fostered 
in the college home. 

The college family life, like that of any other home, 
is concealed from the public view and fully known only 
to members of the family. Otherwise it is not a true 
family life. To be ideal and to give it permanence, the 
college home should embrace the upper and lower class- 
men, the graduate and undergraduate — for all these 



The Fraternities and the College Home 115 

can be educated and developed therein. Our children 
educate us almost as much as we educate them. The 
older brother is trained and developed through the 
responsibility of setting an example to and protecting 
the younger children vv^ho look up to him as the "big 
brother." An only child is likely to be spoiled because 
he lives only to himself. Hence there are true educa- 
tive conditions in the fraternity home where members 
of all classes are intimately gathered together. 

President Wilson, in his memorandum in June, 1907, 
favoring the proposed residential Quads at Princeton, 
our chief nonfraternity college, voices this thought in 
the following significant words: 

"It is clear to everyone that the life of the university can 
be best regulated and developed only when the under class- 
men are in constant association with upper classmen, upon 
such terms as to be formed and guided by them." 

He states one of the objects of the Quads to be 

"to give to the university the kind of common conscious- 
ness which apparently comes from closer sorts of social con- 
tact, to be had only outside the class room, and most easily 
to be got about a common table and in the contacts of a 
common life." 

But it is a grave question whether to-day this home 
consciousness can be developed in groups of one hundred 
or more students arbitrarily gathered together. A col- 
lege home to be successful and permanent must be small 
and congenial, because it selects and trains its own mem- 
bers, and has some of the separateness and exclusive- 
ness of a home. 

In too many institutions the moral tendency of the 



ii6 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

student life as a whole is distinctly downward, and any 
fraternity chapter therein will encounter great difficul- 
ties which attempts consistently to raise its own moral 
or religious life contrary to the drift of the college itself, 
which is merely the resultant of the home life of genera- 
tions of students. The college homes are so true an 
index of the general student life that if we can know the 
inner family life of the fraternity homes in a college, we 
can infallibly construct therefrom the dominant moral 
influences that rule the ninety per cent of student hfe 
in that institution, and thereby determine the true edu- 
cational results of its other departments. 

The shortcomings of many of the Greek-letter and 
other college homes are terrible, as I shall show in the 
next chapter. But these faults and failures are partly 
inherent in any college education, and in any home 
with many members, and always have been; but those 
of the fraternities are principally chargeable to the col- 
lege authorities and alumni, who have regarded chiefly 
the financial and pedagogical departments and have 
neglected and misunderstood the college administration 
and home life departments. 

We must learn to appreciate that, in the training of 
the future citizen, the ninety per cent of the student life, 
with all its activities and interests, may be greater, edu- 
cationally as well as mathematically, than the ten per 
cent of pedagogy, and quite as well worthy of earnest 
and intelligent thought and action; and that the heart 
of that ninety per cent for any individual is his college 
home life, whatever form that life may take. Let us, 
then, turn frankly but sorrowfully to the real conditions 



The Fraternities and the College Home 117 

of some of the college homes at present and in the im- 
mediate past. 

It is unfortunate, at this time when we need to think 
clearly on the true meaning of the college home, that the 
question should be complicated by the high-school fra- 
ternities, which are merely one of the pseudo growths 
that accompany all important social or religious move- 
ments. The home features of the college fraternity, 
which have been its reason for being and growing, are 
entirely lacking in the high-school society, where the 
members still live in their parents' homes. But the 
fraternities have themselves principally to thank if their 
sillier and more foolish features, the remains of their 
own secret-society stage, have been reproduced by their 
high-school admirers and imitators. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE COLLEGE HOME AND COLLEGE VICES 

It is with extreme reluctance that I pen this chapter. 
Specific references to the matters here treated were pur- 
posely omitted in my " Individual Training in Our Col- 
leges." To continue that policy at this time would, to 
my mind, be criminal; because it would fail to point 
out the terrible toll of lives that has marked our failure 
to realize long ago the true conditions surrounding our 
students in their college community and home lives, 
and to thoroughly reorganize our institutions of higher 
learning so that their direct aim shall be to give a traui- 
ing for citizenship and scholarliness along something 
like the lines herein suggested, and upon all the planes of 
the future citizenship of their students as individuals. 

My previous omission was not because of a lack of 
conviction as to the facts, but because of a repugnance 
to all public mention of such things, enforced by the 
reluctance of a lawyer to assert any fact where he did 
not have, or feel authorized to produce, the legal proof 
of his statements. For the things here spoken of are 
not legal crimes in most of our states, and therefore are 
not to be found in our court records; that is, they lie, 
not within the prohibition of the written law, but in the 
realm of the relations of the citizen to the citizen and of 
the citizen to his home. They are moral, not legal, de- 

ii8 



The College Home and College Vices 119 

linquencies, and hence in most cases we can expect to 
find only moral, not legal, evidence as to their existence. 
All mention of them is — or used to be — tabooed in 
polite society, and even now they will very largely be 
denied by those who ought to be the last to deny them ; 
for they have shut their eyes to them, and have not 
studied them, although they have taken place under 
their very eyes. 

In studying college vices — since they are moral de- 
linquencies rather than legal crimes or misdemeanors — 
we must realize that, as in all similar cases, the evidence 
is not often direct, but is hearsay, and on suspicion, and 
largely prejudiced, and that we are likely to get bald 
assertions, and iterations and reiterations, rather than 
anything in the form of even moral evidence. Those 
who know the facts by experience exaggerate the evils, 
and those who do not indulge in the evils belittle the 
facts. Above all, the investigator must not be an alarm- 
ist, or a prude or an informer. The most that he can do 
is quietly and confidentially to get as much and as good 
evidence as possible, and, so far as it can properly 
be done, submit this to disinterested persons who are 
likely to be in a position to corroborate or disprove his 
conclusions. In dealing with the college conditions de- 
scribed in ''Individual Training in Our Colleges," I 
pursued this method, but when I had gathered my 
proofs together I was appalled at what I had found 
in many institutions, and at the conclusions which must 
logically be drawn therefrom. I felt that I must be 
an alarmist, and that my conclusions must be essen- 
tially false, since they differed so widely from the com- 



I20 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

mon view of the colleges and their authorities; and 
I was unwilling to publish those conclusions without 
further confirmation. Therefore I had printed thirty 
impressions of the first rough draft of the book, and 
submitted copies to the former and present Commis- 
sioners of Education of the United States, to college 
presidents and other well-known educators, and to 
college men, young and old, whose opinions were en- 
titled to confidence. It was only after I had gathered 
back these thirty volumes, with the comments noted 
on their margins, and had thoroughly digested them, 
and further verified some points, that I felt warranted 
in publishing the book. The universal approval with 
which its statements and conclusions have been re- 
ceived, and the many confirmatory letters received, 
even from those who were utter strangers, have made 
me feel sure of my position, and have convinced me that 
I owe a duty to higher education, and to the parents and 
youth of our country, and to the commonwealth, to 
speak plainly of certain conditions of the college homes 
and student life as I believe them to be in too many 
instances. 

I willingly take full responsibility for what is here 
said, and ask no one to share this with me, for I have 
carefully weighed it and assumed it with my eyes open. 
I appreciate that what I say cannot be effectively dis- 
proved, in part because no names or places are given. 
I have had the opportunity to learn the facts as to 
student life and college homes from Maine to Cali- 
fornia, and from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Dakota to 
the farthest South. I have talked and corresponded 



The College Home and College Vices 121 

with hundreds of college professors and officials, stu- 
dents, deans, medical men and recent graduates, and 
have carefully examined, weighed and sifted the evi- 
dence, and shall use but a very small portion of what I 
have gathered. I am not attempting to be sensational, 
but rather to point out an unstudied evil which is at 
the very bottom of our college waste heaps, and which 
must be understood by parents, alumni and preparatory 
school teachers if we are to rouse the college authorities 
from what is too often their fatal torpor in regard to 
these things, and if we are to reorganize the colleges 
upon anything like business principles, and if the 
colleges are to perform their duties as public servants. 

These conditions differ in different institutions and 
in different communities and at different times, but have 
never been properly or adequately studied through the 
right agencies in any college. 

Here again we must not overlook the radical differ- 
ences of conditions prevailing in our various institu- 
tions. Some are practically free from the evils herein- 
after referred to; others reek with them; and there are 
all grades between these extremes. Whether or not 
these evils prevail in a given institution, and to what 
extent, is indeed an important question. But even 
more important is the question whether they are being 
thoroughly and wisely studied and treated therein. 
Otherwise they may be suddenly and secretly intro- 
duced and become widespread because no proper guard 
was set against them. Parents should investigate the 
prevailing student life conditions quite as much as the 
pedagogical claims of the institutions to which they are 



122 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

proposing to send their sons. They have a right to de- 
mand that as definite information shall be made avail- 
able upon this subject as upon others as to which the 
catalogues are very explicit. 

College sentiment or, if you please, the college at- 
mosphere is like any other pervading sentiment and 
atmosphere, intangible but vital and cogent. It is the 
residuum of the lives and ideals of many college gen- 
erations which have solidified into influences which 
dominate the life of the college community and of its 
several homes. It is not transient, but a tradition with 
a tremendous power to influence the future students who 
shall feel it and live in it, but who are not in the least 
responsible for it. An impressionable boy must take 
his college home, in its broader or narrower sense, as he 
finds it, and when he leaves it, it will probably remain 
in about the same condition as that in which he found 
it. President Eliot says: 

"The phrase college spirit undoubtedly describes a real 
thing. . . . Slight differences in tone or atmosphere may 
produce striking effects on the prevailing quality of the grad- 
uates of different colleges, and these effects are often trace- 
able to differences in social organization — the complex result 
of traditions, manners and customs, and transmitted opinions 
and sentiments." ' 

Let us not blame the young man who is harmfully 
affected by the noxious and insidious influences of his 
college home, but rather his elders, the college author- 
ities and alumni, who have not studied, understood or 
wisely combated those influences, and the parents who 

> " University Administration," p. 225. 



The College Home and College Vices 123 

take the greatest care about his early home, but sub- 
stantially none about his college home. The miasmatic 
atmosphere for which the young man was in no sense 
responsible, but which has been passed down to him 
from earlier college generations, has but worked out its 
natural and almost inevitable result upon him. As 
already shown, the college state can have very little 
direct influence by law or ordinance upon the homes of 
its citizens, especially where they own and control their 
homes. Its really beneficent influence must be indirect; 
by man upon man; by the individual representing the 
college acting upon the various dominant factors in the 
college homes, whether those factors be graduates or 
undergraduates. But this indirect influence of the 
college has the advantage of being a permanent one, 
which does not change from year to year, and which, 
for this reason, can bring to bear upon its present prob- 
lems the influence of alumni who have felt in the past 
its potency for good upon their own lives. The power 
of the alumni over undergraduate affairs, so strikingly 
shown in football and other athletic management, and 
in many instances in good fraternity chapters, is one of 
the great inherent agencies for good in the college 
economy which is now substantially unused and running 
to waste; and thereby having a direct tendency to pile 
high the college waste heap. 

In many of our larger colleges and universities, and 
in too many of our smaller ones, a very considerable 
part of the college home life is morally rotten — terribly 
so. Some of the smaller and older colleges, with grand 
records in the past, have as low a standard in student 



124 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

morals as the larger universities. Some of the worst 
conditions prevail in minor denominational institutions 
which are presumed to be ultrareligious and to be the 
chief places for furnishing clergymen for such denomi- 
nations. Lest these statements be too sweeping, let me 
again caution the reader that each institution must be 
judged by itself, and stand or fall alone, and at the 
particular period under review. 

In some institutions from twenty per cent to forty 
per cent of the graduate and undergraduate students 
consort with lewd women, and at least as large a ratio 
drink to excess at times. The proportions are much 
higher in the upper classes than in the lower, showing 
that these vices are largely the direct result of influences 
which prevail in the college community life and the 
college home. In some instances at least twenty per 
cent of the students have been venereally diseased be- 
fore their course is finished. All these things, with 
quite too much gambling, are evils of the college home 
life, and must be fought therein, not by college or- 
dinances but by new home influences. Confirmation 
of these assertions must be sought among those inti- 
mately acquainted with the student life and the col- 
lege homes. These appalling figures are based on the 
carefully sifted estimates of the students themselves in 
many widely separated institutions, checked off by men 
whose professional or other college connections have 
brought them into close personal touch with the college 
home life. The testimony of a member of the faculty 
as such may be, and sometimes has been found to be, 
practically worthless in regard to these matters, for they 



The College Home and College Vices 125 

are entirely outside of his pedagogy and therefore out- 
side of his department. They are usually studiously 
concealed from the faculty by common consent of the 
student body, because the attitude of the faculty is 
often that of detecting and punishing individuals, and 
not that of broad-minded statesmen, studying and im- 
proving the underlying conditions of the community 
and the private lives of its citizens. This attitude of 
the faculty sometimes arrays against them even the best 
among the undergraduates, who certainly are not 
sneaks or detectives spying upon the private lives of 
their fellow-students. But, on the contrary, all that i's 
best in the student body can and should be brought to 
the aid of the college in rooting out the causes of such 
evils and in building up an enlightened public senti- 
ment which shall frown upon their continuance. Here 
is another instance where the college might profit by 
the example of the business concern, and, through its 
administrative department, "make all things work to- 
gether for good" in preparing the soil into which the 
seed is to fall. 

In considering as briefly as may be the evil conditions 
of the college home, let us determine, first, whether, 
logically, we should not expect just such evils because 
of the local and other conditions in many institutions; 
secondly, whether these evils have not often been made 
worse and more chronic by the course taken by the 
college authorities and alumni; and, thirdly, let us look 
at some instances which support the charges made. 

First. Just such conditions are to be expected in 
very many institutions. 



126 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

The standard of personal morality in many of our 
cities and communities is very low, especially in mining 
and factory centers where there is a large foreign or 
floating population and many unmarried women earn- 
ing merely starvation wages. In such communities 
the old standards of personal morality are largely un- 
known. Drunkenness and the social evil are rife, and 
there is no well-defined and long-standing moral senti- 
ment of the community to frown upon personal im- 
morality. On the contrary, the public sentiment of a 
large proportion of the inhabitants as to the social evil, 
drunkenness and gambling is thoroughly debased, and 
is constantly being lowered by many vicious influences. 
The percentage of low grog shops, of crime and of im- 
morality is exceedingly large. Many of our colleges 
and universities are located in or near hotbeds of this 
character, and many students in other institutions come 
from such localities, or are descended from fathers 
whose early lives have not been impeccable in this re- 
gard and who do not claim to their sons that they have 
been. Such influences as these are never on the de- 
fensive, but carry on an active and insidious offensive 
campaign of solicitation and temptation. Moreover, 
the local conditions of college towns often change, sud- 
denly or slowly, from those which were ideal to those 
which are frightful, or a near-by factory city offers all 
sorts of solicitations with few chances of detection. Ex- 
cept in large cities these evils are much more likely to 
be perpetrated in a neighboring factory center than in 
the college town. 

One dean, who has been unusually successful in pro- 



The College Home and College Vices 127 

gressive and effective religious work among college un- 
dergraduates, writes of this: 

"There ought to be a law, federal if possible, prohibiting 
the presence of such things at a college center. Communi- 
ties regard colleges as sources of revenue and should be re- 
quired to choose the college or the dives and saloons. Look 

at the colleges located in towns next to the 

River, across which, on the side, such things line the 

banks. State laws are inadequate and local option is too 
uncertain. All these vices huddle in college towns, seeking 
like buzzards the easiest prey. Something of this kind is 
possible, it seems to me, where the government makes ap- 
propriations, as in the case of state colleges and universities." 

These are not fanciful pictures, but facts bearing 
directly upon the question of college reorganization. 
For our purposes they are not matters for the social 
settlement in the slums of a great city, but everyday 
influences acting upon the college home lives of a very 
large proportion of our undergraduates, and affecting 
their training for citizenship. They are the things which 
make the ninety per cent of the student life the most 
important department of the college because it is to 
determine the results in college and in after life of the 
work of the other departments. They also bear upon 
the great duty which the college owes to the common- 
wealth and to all connected with its own self. 
. But another terrible aspect of the social evil in college 
is that the women are frequently of a low class, who also 
consort freely with mill hands, miners and rounders of 
the worst type, and are almost of necessity diseased and 
almost as certain to communicate these diseases. From 
the very nature of the case our college students are not 
financially able to indulge in expensive luxuries of this 



128 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

kind, and as a matter of fact their indulgences are fre- 
quently with such a low grade of women that disease is 
almost sure to follow. And this is what is happening 
and for years has been happening daily throughout our 
institutions of higher learning; and not only in them 
but among the boys in our large preparatory schools and 
high schools, especially during vacations. The preva- 
lence of these evil conditions constantly tends to fur- 
ther lower college sentiment and make it easier for any 
student to drift with the crowd; and strange as it may 
appear, those who have become diseased often seem 
most anxious to justify their condition by inducing others 
to join in their vices. 

Moreover, at this very period of life, when nature 
intended that the sexes should meet in pure and natural 
association, our young college men are largely deprived 
of opportunities to meet young women of their own 
station in life, and thus are the more easily tempted by 
the vile. There are many lowering and evil tendencies 
and factors in our grouping together thousands of young 
unmarried men in colleges and universities, which must 
in a geometrical ratio produce a decline in the personal 
morals of the individuals and of the college home life, 
unless actively and wisely combated in the college homes 
themselves. This tendency, unless studied and checked, 
must, in the nature of things, grow steadily worse— 
and this has been the case too frequently during the past 
twenty-five years. 

Secondly, these conditions have been made worse by 
the very course of the college authorities and alumni. 

We would expect the psychologists and philosophers 



The College Home and College Vices 129 

of the faculties and among the alumni to anticipate such 
a condition of affairs, and to forewarn all factors inter- 
ested in the problem, and to unite them to combat an 
evil which cannot stand still, which must be dissected 
and studied in all its ramifications, and then constantly, 
wisely and consistently combated, unless it is to assume 
greater and greater proportions under such favorable 
surroundings. But comparatively little of this has been 
done. We have not realized that these great evils are 
not the products of the college financial, pedagogical 
or administrative departments, but distinctly and almost 
solely of the student life, and hence to be studied and 
combated therein. In some colleges there are lectures 
upon these subjects, but instead of being treated as the 
performance of a high duty toward the commonwealth 
and its homes, the lectures are often so low and broad 
in character as to do more harm than good, serving as 
student jokes throughout the course. In one institu- 
tion for many years the medical students were openly 
advised by a prominent professor to have illicit inter- 
course so that they might better understand some of 
their studies; with the local results which might have 
been expected. On the other hand, not only have our 
college authorities failed to properly study or combat 
these evils, but they have too often emphatically and 
unceasingly denied their existence, when a little exami- 
nation would have shown them that they were wrong. 
One professor, in a college situated in a community 
which morally is notoriously one of the worst in the 
country, was quite indignant at my suggestion that in 
his institution any considerable proportion of the under- 



130 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

graduates were diseased. But after a frank discussion 
of facts and local conditions, he admitted that the 
average might be as high as thirty per cent. Again and 
again this fatal blindness, and even unwillingness to 
see, of our college authorities is encountered by those 
who investigate the college home life from the only sane 
and safe standpoint, that of the students themselves. 
On the other hand, there are many who admit the full 
extent of the evil, but ask what can possibly be done to 
meet such an insidious enemy. 

This assurance that these evils do not exist in their 
own institution, and this failure to have any adequate 
appreciation of the evil or of the means to be taken to 
lessen it, are about on a par with the college policy 
which for years allowed the playing of intercollegiate 
games away from the home grounds and in the largest 
cities. This increased the gate receipts, but at the same 
time so aggravated the growth of vice among the stu- 
dents that out of very shame the college authorities had 
to require all games to be played on the home grounds 
of one of the contestants. 

An up-to-date administrative department would have 
foreseen this evil result, or would have felt at once the 
lowering of the moral tone of the college, and would not 
have waited to enforce a remedy until the scandal com- 
pelled action. This is but another instance of how the 
college is always looking backward; or, as one astute pro- 
fessor writes, who has widely studied conditions in many 
institutions, especially at ^;he West: 

"I have noted one most curious characteristic among 
many of my colleagues — they cannot rid themselves of the 



The College Home and College Vices 131 

delusion that they are still concerned with the secluded spot- 
less life of the New England college of eighty years ago." 

Such delusions as these are not only fatal to the under- 
graduate, but proof positive that it is impossible for the 
instructors under modern conditions to do their best 
work in their own department and at the same time 
perform satisfactorily the functions of another depart- 
ment. Our duty to the commonwealth and to all the 
other interests which center in the college demand that 
we shall install an up-to-date business administration 
which shall anticipate evil conditions, and nip them in 
the bud or offset them so that they shall not ruin the 
college product or any part of it. 

But, thirdly, is there any tangible proof of these ter- 
rible assertions? 

Unfortunately, yes; although but a few examples will 
be given to illustrate the failure of these public-service 
corporations to do their full duty, and the crying need 
of a business reorganization. 

This question has been asked in universities where 
local medical schools afford opportunities for medical 
investigation which do not exist in the ordinary college, 
and the following appear to be the facts: In city in- 
stitutions, or those situated in or very near factory or 
mining centers, the percentage of evil and disease is 
usually greatest. This percentage is much larger in 
the graduate schools than in the academic courses; and 
in the latter the percentages steadily increase from the 
lower through the upper classes ; and it is not too much 
to assume that in some cases at least twenty-five per 
cent of those who complete the professional school 



132 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

courses have at some time been diseased. In some 
places competent authorities put the percentage higher. 
From one university a professor, whom I had asked 
about this, writes: "Physicians tell me that venereal 
disease is common, though not rife, here"; but these 
terms should be reversed according to the testimony of 
recent medical graduates from this institution. 

Admittedly and fortunately, this does not prove that 
this state of affairs prevails in every place. But it does 
illustrate my claim that the colleges and universities are 
not doing their full duty to the commonwealth or them- 
selves. The institution last referred to has a member- 
ship which exceeds the combined college enrollment 
of the whole country sixty years ago. Yet it takes no 
official account of a state of affairs — perfectly evident 
to candid investigators — which largely unfits its stu- 
dent citizens to do their best work during their course 
or to grow into the highest type of citizens and parents 
in after years. From the standpoint of the common- 
wealth, or of the high interests which the colleges and 
universities are presumed to safeguard and foster, can 
I be charged with unfairness or extravagance of lan- 
guage when I speak of the fatal blindness and apathy 
of too large a proportion of our college authorities? 

About a year ago the Associated Press sent out a dis- 
patch telling how two Roman Catholic priests in a cer- 
tain city, from their pulpits, had solemnly warned the 
young women of their parishes not to associate with the 
students of a neighboring university. Those who are 
acquainted with the student conditions in that institution 
know that these priests would be justified in almost any 



The College Home and College Vices 133 

measures which they might take to protect their young 
women parishioners. A reputable physician has re- 
cently stated that of his own knowledge all the under- 
graduate members of a certain fraternity chapter (his 
own) were diseased, with the exception of three fresh- 
men who had just been initiated, and that almost all 
the recent graduates had suffered in the same manner. 
The dean of long standing of another university, himself 
a fraternity member, told me that in his institution the 
student life was so bad that it seemed to him that the 
upper class and graduate members of the fraternities 
seemed most anxious to see how short a time could 
elapse between the regular fraternity initiation and that 
into the prevalent vices of the student body; and he en- 
forced this statement with some appalling instances al- 
most too horrible to believe and certainly to repeat here. 
In the college homes of some institutions separate towels 
and other supplies are kept for those who are actively 
diseased; just as in many such homes there are special 
rooms and accommodations, " boozatoriums," for those 
who are brought home drunk. In too many college 
homes there is a fearful obscenity and filthiness of lan- 
guage, but this is what is to be expected from the moral 
conditions prevailing in the student life of those in- 
stitutions. 

Some very bad conditions in all these respects are 
also to be found in many of our preparatory schools ; and 
these habits are carried thence and spread broadcast 
through the colleges to which the students go, thereby 
contaminating many youth who come directly from pure 
home influences. On the other hand, it is the reflex in- 



134 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

fluence of these lower phases of the college home life that 
is likely to be reproduced in our high-school fraternities 
in such an insidious form that they cannot be combated 
with entire success. 

The foregoing are but a few examples picked from a 
mass of evidence, gathered by going to the right place, 
the college home, and by sifting out the facts as care- 
fully as possible, and with a full consciousness of the 
terribleness of the arraignment of present conditions in 
the student life department. Everywhere the convic- 
tion is borne home that these conditions are the legiti- 
mate results of two forces — the social and moral ten- 
dencies of the age and locality, and the fatal blindness of 
the college authorities and alumni and of parents to the 
real extent of the social evil, and its accompanying vices, 
and their theory that prohibition means prevention — a 
survival of the mediaeval methods of the earlier college, 
instead of a resort to modern scientific methods of at- 
tempting to locate the underlying cause of the trouble 
and then grapple with that. 

But the growth of the drink habit among our students 
is another chief cause for the lowering of college morals 
in the college community and home life; and for this, 
also, the college authorities and alumni are chiefly re- 
sponsible. While our railroads are enforcing the rule 
of total abstinence among their employees, and are even 
requiring one member of a train crew to report another 
member who has been drinking, our colleges are, in too 
many instances, directly and indirectly putting a pre- 
mium on the drink habit and increasing the toll of their 
undergraduates who must eventually become confirmed 



The College Home and College Vices 135 

dipsomaniacs, and who, when drunk, are liable to yield 
to worse temptations which would not otherwise ap- 
peal to them. 

As an example of how this is sometimes done in- 
directly by the colleges, we find that in one well-known 
denominational institution the college politics have for 
years been practically decided at Saturday night gather- 
ings in the barroom of a country hotel, where drinking 
and the low stories of commercial travelers are the 
preparation of some of the most influential students 
for the compulsory religious exercises of the Sabbath. 
It does not require much time spent in the homes of 
this institution on a Sabbath afternoon to discover that 
the hotel bar has a greater hold than the college church 
on many representative undergraduates who largely 
mold student sentiment. The entering freshman is 
soon made to feel that he may cut church or sleep 
through its services, but that he must be early and often 
at the hotel barroom, if he is to figure in college pol- 
itics and activities. No faculty in the land is more 
touchy than this if it be intimated that the personal 
morals of its students are low — so low, in fact, that a 
large proportion of the well-to-do or prominent under- 
graduates are grossly immoral, and constant and often 
heavy drinkers, and have, in neighboring institutions 
whose own students are certainly not slow, an unenvi- 
able reputation for being tough. 

In many institutions if a man wishes to be a strong 
factor in college politics he must qualify in his earlier 
years for membership in the junior and senior drinking 
clubs. This means that for a certain proportion, often 



136 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

a large one, of the undergraduates it is a great thing to 
have the capacity of "a tank" and a marked abihty to 
drink the other fellow under the table. 

Moreover, the commencement ideals of many of our 
colleges and the scenes at many alumni banquets are 
directly conducive to a constant and further lowering 
of the moral tone of the college community and home 
life. Recent classes returning for their reunions must 
provide free beer and the services of professional bar- 
keepers to prove that they are worthy sons of a noble 
Alma Mater ; and large numbers of undergraduates are 
urged to drink at these free bars., which are openly 
patronized by many professors. Do such things throw 
any light back upon the habits and moral atmosphere 
of the college lives of the recent graduates? Indeed, it 
is the honest belief of many young alumni that these 
moral conditions in the colleges can never be greatly 
bettered; that they are inherent in the college and must 
always be about as bad as at present. They admit 
the evils, and will tell of the conditions as they knew 
them in college; but they earnestly contend that the pres- 
ent moral conditions cannot be permanently improved. 
They are absolutely correct in their conclusions — unless 
there is a complete reorganization of our colleges upon 
business principles, and with the new and higher ideals 
of a college state, and a full appreciation of the duties 
which are owed to the commonwealth and to the stu- 
dents who are in training to be citizens therein. Here 
is another straw to show what must have been the moral 
atmosphere which these young men breathed in college. 
A professor writes: 



The College Home and College Vices 137 

"This cannot be put too strongly. One of the greatest 
difl&culties is with the returning graduates, few of whom wish 
any change — except more 'quiet' — in this matter." 

College and fraternity banquets frequently end in 
drunken orgies. Do such facts tend to prove the truth 
of the charges here made against the conditions of the 
undergraduate home life? If so many of our promis- 
ing alumni, who were prominent in college, use their 
alumni and fraternity banquets for "drimks," it fol- 
lows conclusively either that the seeds of these habits 
were sown in undergraduate days, or else that their 
college course left their moral characters so weakened 
that they could not withstand the temptations of after 
life. I am grieved to say that either explanation proves 
my case against the colleges and their authorities and 
alumni. 

The impressionable youth from the farm, or from the 
carefully guarded home where all mention of such vices 
has been constantly avoided, is not the person most to 
blame if he is perverted by the foul atmosphere for 
which his elders are largely responsible; or if he imag- 
ines that he is doing only what the college world is doing 
when he joins in the vices which he finds prevalent in 
his own college home and among his intimates, and 
sanctioned by the example of prominent alumni. At 
least he has pretty good ground for his belief that this 
is a fair representation of the whole college life and 
"that everybody does it." It is not at all surprising 
that under such conditions we find that a large propor- 
tion of our students are, before graduation, steady 
tipplers if not incipient dipsomaniacs. They are not 



138 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

content with drinking beer, but must have cocktails and 
highballs and similar stimulants as regularly as old 
topers. 

What would happen in a business department where 
such an atmosphere was discovered? Do our college 
authorities or our undergraduates appreciate that many 
of the latter, if they are to hold responsible positions, 
must give surety bonds? And that the bond will not be 
issued if the applicant is found to be a heavy drinker or 
immoral? Or that the bond will provide in substance 
that the employer "will immediately notify the surety 
in writing upon becoming aware that the employee is 
gambling, speculating or committing any disreputable, 
lewd or unlawful act?" Is this the true ideal of a 
college education for citizenship? 

It has been claimed that twenty per cent of the men 
who come to the Water Street Mission, and one third of 
those who ask for beds at the Bowery Missions in New 
York City are college men, and that over one hundred 
college graduates are behind the bars at Sing Sing. 

This must be taken with the qualification, on the one 
hand, that it covers not only college graduates, but all 
those who have had any higher education, here or 
abroad, corresponding to our college course; and, on the 
other hand, that it covers but a small fraction of two per 
cent of our total population. Any decent business ad- 
ministrative department would long ago have realized 
that thi's was largely the college waste heap, and that 
here were sociological problems of the highest moment 
to it and its future success and which it ought to study 
first of all. The record could not be as bad as it is if the 



The College Home and College Vices 139 

duty of the college to the commonwealth was really par- 
amount in the eyes of college authorities and alumni. 

The position of the college authorities upon this whole 
question of the student life and the college home is well 
summed up by a distinguished professor, investigator 
and thinker, born and educated abroad, who writes : 

"What you say of the inattention of the authorities can 
be no more astounding to you than it has long been to me. 
It is the most nonplussing fact that I have encountered. 
Most astounding is their satisfaction with things as they are. 
Did you ever know folk who sang so many paeans to them- 
selves?" 

Of this letter a college professor writes : 

"I greatly doubt the fairness of this. I beheve the general 
attitude to be (i) We cannot do anything to remedy this. 
(2) If we could, the demands of our professional duties 
leave us no time." 

I can only say in passing that this is one of the best 
arguments that I have heard for a separate administra- 
tive department which can do something and which has 
time for that which is far more important and funda- 
mental than instruction in books, to wit, character- 
building! 

Surely the evidence need not be multiplied, as it could 
easily be, to show that I am justified in my assertion, 
here repeated, that "in many of our larger colleges and 
universities, and in too many of our smaller ones, a very 
considerable part of the college home life is rotten — 
terribly so." 

I am not now discussing these things from a moral or 
religious standpoint, but merely as a reorganizer who is 
trying, in a purely business way, to determine whether 



140 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

our colleges do need reorganizing because their admin- 
istrative and student life conditions — ^which lie at the 
very foundation of their usefulness to the individual and 
the commonwealth — are thoroughly and unnecessarily 
bad; and what are the essential elements of the college 
which must be considered when preparing a plan of 
reorganization; and what are the evils to be avoided 
in the future, and the methods by which this shall 
be done. This is solely a dispassionate discussion of 
whether our colleges should be reorganized by admin- 
istrative experts on modern business principles, or by 
their own pedagogical experts on college ideals and by 
college methods, so called. 

Viewing our institutions from the business man's 
standpoint, and not from that of the moralist or theo- 
logian or cataloguer, we find vicious methods and ideals 
which waste the time, strength and temper of teachers 
and taught; which largely unfit the pupils for future 
good work, while failing to properly train them as in- 
dividuals; which fail to use to advantage the various 
available agencies which would enable them to do 
better work; which omit to study or combat the influ- 
ences which corrupt the college community and home 
life; which build high the college waste heap, yet neglect 
utterly to study it, or even to realize what a reflection 
it is upon the institution that the heap steadily grows 
larger instead of smaller. 

But there is also another and even higher view that 
must be taken of this matter. I have shown how 
the colleges have become quasi states, because of the 
powers, rights, functions and bounties which have been 



The College Home and Colleges Vices 141 

conferred upon them by the commonwealth, and that 
in return they owe important reciprocal duties. The 
home is admittedly at the foundation of the state. The 
colleges are committing an unutterable crime against 
the state and all its citizens if, while they are educat- 
ing our young men, they do not do all in their power 
to safeguard their future homes from drunkenness 
and disease. Physicians tell us that one form of these 
diseases can never be surely cured, and that we can 
never know certainly that the other form is permanently 
cured. How well are the colleges repaying their obli- 
gations to the state and to the public when they allow 
vice to grow rampant in the college homes — it makes 
but little difference whether disease is ''common" or 
"rife" — and yet do not raise a finger toward concert- 
edly studying the facts, or toward getting at the real 
source of the evil, or toward stamping it out, as our 
Government has stamped out yellow fever in its trop- 
ical possessions. The colleges are too often blind 
leaders of the blind, with low ideals, and a terrible 
record behind them from which they must be rescued 
by reorganization. I repeat that their record as pub- 
lic corporations is in many ways far below that of 
many of their fellow-servants, the public-utilities cor- 
porations. 

If, without intelligent study of their own problems 
and conditions, or the adoption of ordinary business 
methods amply sufficient to remedy the evils in large 
part, our colleges are yearly discharging into the body 
politic thousands of diseased men or incipient drunk- 
ards who otherwise ought to be largely the fathers of 



142 The Reorganization a] Our Colleges 

the educated class in the next generation, the question 
is one that chiefly affects, not the wrongdoing colleges, 
firmly secure in their rich and inalienable endowments, 
but the state and its future, and the helpless families, 
wives and children which it is bound to protect. 

Carefully prepared statistics in an old and prominent 
university indicate that only about seventy per cent of 
its present graduates marry, and that the average num- 
ber of children per family is 2.3, including female 
children, those who die in youth and those who do not 
marry; or about forty per cent of the number of children 
per family a century earlier. It is evident that, if this 
is anything like a fair average, the ordinary college 
class does not even reproduce itself, and that the college 
would actually soon die out if it depended for students 
solely upon all of the sons born to its graduates. In 
other words, the college graduates belong to a tree 
which is dying down, and not to one which is increasing 
in size. Physicians tell us that the conditions which 
have been referred to as prevailing in some college homes 
may be in part responsible for results such as those above 
named. But however this may be, is it too much for 
the parents of the land to demand of the college author- 
ities a strict accounting as to how they have fulfilled the 
duty which they owe, to the commonwealth and to the 
homes therein, to train and turn out the highest types 
of husbands, fathers and friends? 

At this point the college home touches every home, 
and its home life affects the future of the state; and the 
state and every parent in it have the right to demand a 
reorganization of this part of the college economy, and 



The College Home and College Vices 143 

its proper administration in the future; so that here at 
least there shall be a college education for citizenship in 
all its planes. 

The state cannot assume the functions of the colleges, 
nor administer their $600,000,000 of funds and property. 
It can only force them to do their own work properly, 
and to keep their student Hfe department clean and en- 
nobling, so that they and their graduates shall not be 
an actual menace to the state itself and to its innocent 
citizens, especially in the future. 

This chapter, to this point, has been submitted to 
many men prominent in and out of college, and I have 
been much interested in their replies. One, who is at 
the head of a great and successful religious movement 
among undergraduates at the West, writes: "These are 
hard things but true." Another says: "You have 
rather understated the facts as I believe them to be in 
four Southern institutions with whose student condi- 
tions I am intimately acquainted." One thinks that, 
from his own experience, the facts must be exagger- 
ated. Two doubt the advisability of publishing the 
facts so fully, yet expressly state that they were cor- 
rectly given. 

Not one denies that, in the main, the arraignment is 
justifiable and correct. 

Not one has a word to say approving the past course 
0} the colleges in these matters. 

Others have thanked me for the chapter, and heartily 
approved of my position therein. One divine, who for 
many years has been at the head of the college work of 
a great religious denomination, in answer to my ques- 



144 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

tion whether I should pubHsh this chapter, replied : "Yes, 
by all means; even if you print nothing else." 

For the purposes of the reorganizer, the question of 
chief importance is not whether the statements of this 
chapter are exaggerated. That is merely a matter of 
degree. The really important questions are quite dif- 
ferent. Does this chapter correctly point out and define 
dangerous forms of evil which are imnecessarily prev- 
alent among our students? And correctly place the 
exact location of these evils in the college economy? 
And the manner in which these evils are now regarded 
by the students, parents and community, and the col- 
lege and fraternity authorities and alunmi? And the 
methods — if any — ^now employed to root out these 
evils, or minimize their baneful consequences ? Have all 
those interested in the college problem, or who could 
contribute to its solution, done, their full duty in study- 
ing this ninety per cent of the student life, and the 
peculiar surroundings and temptations of the under- 
graduates in the college community and home, and in 
applying wise measures to meet the conditions thus 
revealed? Is the college, as a public corporation, doing 
its full duty in this respect to the commonwealth? If, 
after patient investigation, the reorganizer can truthfully 
answer "yes" to the last two questions, he must feel that 
he can do little where so many others, who should be 
better judges, have failed. But if he must answer "no," 
there is hope that a correct diagnosis will lead to a 
successful prognosis. 

To the moralist, the mistakes of the past are a source 
of regret and complaint; to the reorganizer, a mine of 



The College Home and College Vices 145 

information; for to him the present and the future are 
the important things. Wherefore he looks upon the 
errors of the past as things to be carefully charted that 
his own bark may sail safely where so many others have 
been shipv/recked. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DOMINANT POSITION OF THE STUDENT LIFE 
DEPARTMENT 

Is there, then, a remedy for the evils of the student 
life department? I unhesitatingly answer "yes," if we 
are willing to pursue a philosophical rather than a Puri- 
tanical course — to adopt modern business methods 
rather than those heretofore recognized as college 
methods. 

It is largely because, in the absence of a separate ad- 
ministrative department, we have not clearly analyzed 
the fundamental change in the college or fully appre- 
ciated its significance to state, institution, faculty, stu- 
dents and parents, that there has been so much of chaos 
and conflict in our modern concept of the college and 
its functions and place. A correct analysis of the col- 
lege itself and of its constituent parts ought greatly to 
simplify these problems and point the way to a remedy. 
Otherwise, let us candidly confess that the analysis it- 
self is probably at fault and that our argument is vain. 
It is easy to apply this test. 

Differences and disputes largely result because men 
argue from differing premises, not clearly thought out; 
but it is strange that this should be strikingly so in our 
colleges of to-day; that they, which claim the name of 
institutions of higher learning, should not have care- 



Dominant Position of Student Life Department 147 

fully gathered, arranged and analyzed the facts about 
themselves — ^financial, executive, pedagogical, student 
life and administrative — and that, with these common 
premises agreed upon, all interested in the college prob- 
lems should not also have agreed pretty well upon the 
remedy and line of action. 

Let us, then, again and further consider the quasi col- 
lege state and its constituent parts, to see if we can for- 
mulate and agree upon some premises on which to base 
our future course. 

All will agree that an ideal state should have good 
written laws, honestly and fairly enforced; and an in- 
telligent and upright body of citizens, who, under an 
enlightened public sentiment, maintain a high ideal in 
their political and other relations to the commonwealth, 
and as well in their business and community lives and 
in their homes; and further, that any state must be pro 
tanto a, failure where the laws are poor or poorly en- 
forced; or where the political, community or business 
lives of a majority of the citizens are on a low level ; or 
where the homes are uncultivated and debasing in their 
general influence. An upright judge can give an im- 
partial trial and inflict merited punishment after con- 
viction, but not much else. It is not his duty to detect 
crimes, or to apprehend the criminal or to render the 
verdict. Notwithstanding all his efforts, justice may fail 
because the laws are faulty, or because public senti- 
ment shields the criminal, or even aids in his defense or 
forces his pardon after conviction. The law, the citi- 
zens, the home, and the enfolding public and private 
sentiment which ennobles each of these, are each and 



148 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

all of them essential to the perfect commonwealth, and 
anything short of this makes it imperfect as a whole, no 
matter how perfect any one department or plane may 
be. So a man cannot be a complete and efficient citi- 
zen unless he fulfills all the obligations which he owes 
under the written law of the state, and in his general 
political or civic relations, and under the unwritten law 
and comity of his community, business or profession, and 
in his home. No matter how perfect he may be in any 
one of these planes of his life, he is one-sided and in- 
complete if he unnecessarily fails in the others. 

Our colleges have failed to agree as to their ideals be- 
cause they have not adequately appreciated that they, 
too, are pro tanto unsuccessful if they do not do their 
full duty to each student citizen; if they do not, so far 
as possible, within the limitations of a four years' 
course, set him forward on his road to become a well- 
rounded man, trained to do clean and clear intellectual 
work, whatever his vocation; but also able and willing 
to take his part in the struggle for the highest and best 
in the political, professional or business life of any com- 
munity of which he may become a member; and as 
capable of becoming the head of a family which shall 
in the end add to the citizen wealth of the common- 
wealth. Here, too, is the real duty of the college to the 
state : not merely to turn out strong and fully developed 
scholars, but wholesome citizens who shall be well-de- 
veloped students and thinkers, high-minded business or 
professional men, fathers of ideal homes, and able to 
lead in political, civic or social affairs. Some of these 
objects are before each of our colleges, or before some 



Dominant Position oj Student Lije Department 149 

men in every college, but it may be questioned whether 
any institution has had them all so clearly before it that 
it has thoroughly appreciated the true relative functions 
of the instructional department and of the college com- 
munity and home life, in the education and training of 
the future citizen, which, for four years, has been placed 
by the commonwealth in the keeping of the college. » 

Hence, for reorganization purposes, we may classify 
our colleges, or the dominant influences within them, 
according to the predominance in each (a) of the peda- 
gogic, or (b) of the college community, or (c) of the col- 
lege home life forces. 

(a) We find one class of colleges or college forces 
which places an undue emphasis upon what they are 
pleased to call scholarship, but which may too often be 
merely rank, and a diploma under a vicious marking 
system, or mere intellectual acquisitiveness with no abil- 
ity to impart or use for the good of others, for it may 
be united with a poor physique, the habits of a recluse 
or crank, the shortsightedness of a bigot, the manners 
of a boor or a general inefficiency. The result may be 
an intellectual prodigy, but a practical failure from the 
standpoint of the state, the citizen, the business or pro- 
fessional man, and the family. There have been many 
such cases among those who have graduated in the first 
ten of their college class. In these instances the merely 
pedagogic or book-learning side of the course is liable 
to be overdeveloped ; and the unthinking or prejudiced, 
seeing its manifold failures to produce efficient and 
all-around citizens, condemn the institutions where 
these ideals are followed too exclusively. Even Phi 



150 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Beta Kappa honors may be so misused. Only recently 
I asked an unusually bright and capable student, at the 
end of his junior year, why he had not gotten into Phi 
Beta Kappa. He replied that he could easily have 
done so if, like many of his classmates, he had elected 
certain easy courses in which he could have taken high 
rank with no exertion; but that he planned to study 
law, and felt that he needed all the history and eco- 
nomics that he could get. By so doing he had gained 
much better preparation for his life's work but had lost 
in college rank, and evidently had acquired a contempt 
for the men who studied for rank rather than for worth. 
It is unfortunate that upon every college faculty there 
are some who apparently look upon college rank as 
synonymous with a college education, and who cannot 
understand that, in truth, the studying for rank in 
college may have blotted out, in many instances, any 
ideal of training for complete and efficient citizenship 
in the future. I am not in the least decrying so-called 
scholarship in colleges. On the contrary, I would have 
more and more and still more of it in the reorganized 
college, if it means the ability to think clearly and well. 
But I would not exalt the spurious article — the marking 
system variety. The college course is not to make a man 
a scholar but to render him scholarly. True scholar- 
ship can come only in the graduate school, followed by 
years of independent work. The college course can 
only implant or nourish the seeds of scholarliness, the 
desire, ambition and ability to become a scholar. 

I would let true scholarliness count for its exact value 
in rounding out the character and efficiency of the 



Dominant Position oj Student Life Department 151 

future citizen. I would build it deep into the reor- 
ganized college that manhood, not marks — wisdom, not 
knowledge — efficiency and unselfishness, not a diploma 
and selfishness — are what will count in the world's work 
of the individual in the years to come. I would gladly 
double the amount of solid intellectual work done by the 
average student, but at the same time I would make it 
perfectly plain to him that I was not aiming to raise his 
college rank but his future effectiveness — and the aver- 
age student would respond most heartily. 

{b) Another class of colleges — or the dominant in- 
fluences therein — have placed an undue emphasis upon 
the college community life, chiefly as seen in intercol- 
legiate athletics. Admittedly, the results have been dis- 
astrous in many ways, and on every side we hear these 
results held up to prove that all intercollegiate athletics 
should be abolished. Yet these contests, and the 
training and coaching incident to them, may have 
their undoubted use in rounding out certain phases of 
the character of the future citizen which cannot be 
gotten from mere books or recitations. Such contests, 
rightly conducted, teach the student citizen loyalty, en- 
thusiasm, discipline, unselfishness, and the ability to or- 
ganize his fellows for a common purpose and to work 
with others for such a purpose. Everything which help- 
fully trains the student citizen in his college community 
life tends to make him a broader minded and more 
efficient citizen in after years when the commonwealth 
asks what important political and civic benefits it is 
to derive from the talents committed for four years 
to the control of the institution, as distinguished from 



152 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

the parents' home and the business world. Admittedly, 
in intercollegiate athletics the college community life has 
been too often overstimulated and overdeveloped, and 
the strictly studious side has been improperly dwarfed 
and neglected. But the enthusiasm of modern college 
reunions and commencements, and the vast sums of 
money which have flowed therefrom into the college 
coffers, have been largely the result of the inspiring 
college community life. Presidents and faculties have 
encouraged intercollegiate contests because thereby 
they have gotten hold of their own alumni and have 
brought into view the financial needs of the college. 
But they should have seen that if there was any chi- 
canery in their intercollegiate athletics, to that extent 
they unfitted their student citizens for clean citizenship 
and civic righteousness in future years. 

(c) But there is a third class of colleges in which an 
undue emphasis has been placed upon the college home 
life, and in which the social activities are apt to be over- 
stimulated so long as undue prominence is given to the 
college home. The fraternity and club have, or may 
have, their great and beneficent uses in rounding out the 
character of the future citizen. They can and often do 
furnish him with the polish and social culture which 
will give him great power for good in after years. They 
can or should train the personal traits and moral qual- 
ities which will go to make him the good son, husband, 
father and friend, and able to get on with his fellow- 
men, and which assuredly are not less important than 
mere intellectual vigor or intelligent citizenship. I have 
seen too often with my own eyes the splendid educa- 



Dominant Position of Student Life Department 153 

tional effects of a good fraternity home to have any 
doubt as to its real power. But I have been impressed 
by the danger that such a home may make a man lazy 
rather than vicious, and that it must have some un- 
failing gauge upon the outside which will insure good 
intellectual results within the home, as well as the un- 
doubted social benefits which come from a good home 
either within or without the college. As there may be 
overdevotion to study or to athletics, so there may be 
overattention to the social functions and other distrac- 
tions of the college home. 

It is at this point that one weighty objection is made 
to the fraternities. They do — like soft culture courses, 
and unlimited electives, and overstrenuous athletics, 
and many other unregulated parts 0} the college — tend to 
distract the attention of the institution and its students 
away from scholarliness and interfere with good peda- 
gogical work. But, as we shall see, the trouble is not 
with the fraternities nor peculiar to them. We are look- 
ing at the effect, and not at the cause, which lies far 
deeper and in the college organization. All these things 
are important elements in a college education adapted to 
modern conditions, and have their essential places there- 
in. But they have not been kept in their proper places 
nor within their proper spheres, and it will not be diffi- 
cult for us to see why this has been so. Therefore, let 
us watch carefully for the reasons why, in an institution 
devoted, like Alma Mater, to higher instruction, the 
best and the most necessary irmovations and improve- 
ments have run amuck, and have wrought widespread 
demoralization, and gi*eat and irreparable loss of splen- 



154 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

did citizen material, and unpardonable failure as a 
public servant. There must be such reasons! Hence 
we can never propose and carry out an adequate and 
successful reorganization until we can put our finger 
upon the exact point in the college economy where the 
evils have been wrought and the mistakes made, nor 
until we have plucked up courage to fight these evils in 
the right way at the right spot — and no other ! We shall 
then perceive that the trouble has not been with these 
new elements of the college, but rather with the way in 
which these elements have been handled; that electives, 
and Germanization, and the new college-university, and 
intercollegiate athletics, and the fraternities, and scores 
of other things, are essentially right and necessary in the 
new college state — although they were not in the older 
college based upon the home — and that the trouble has 
been that, in all these cases, we have allowed the means 
to become the end, the servant to become the master; 
and that the pedagogical department has suffered cor- 
respondingly. I intend to show why this has been so, 
and what is to be the remedy. 

We shall, then, have made material progress toward 
the solution of our reorganization if we can substan- 
tially agree upon the following premises: that the col- 
lege annually receives a fresh crop of embryo citi- 
zens, breadwinners and home-makers, for whose training 
for citizenship it is directly responsible to the state, 
and whose future usefulness and development depend 
largely upon the true wisdom displayed during these 
four years by the college authorities; that this annual 
crop is a heterogeneous collection of all kinds and 



Dominant Position oj Student Life Department 155 

conditions, mental, moral, physical and financial, in 
all stages of life-growth, and each requiring individual 
treatment to counteract his weak points and substan- 
tially develop his strong ones; that this treatment must 
be applied in varying measure to the individual by the 
college in its coordinate and correlated instructional 
and student life departments; that each of these de- 
partments has its great and substantial functions at this 
period of the young man's life and growth, and that 
failure properly to use any of these functions may result 
in stunting his future usefulness as a citizen, bread- 
winner or home-maker; that these departments have 
differing values and possibilities in rounding out differ- 
ent students to complete manhood; that therefore each 
department must be maintained in a state of the highest 
efficiency to do its part for each citizen student; that 
this is the period when "the preparation for life" is 
about drawing to its close, and "life in earnest" is 
about to begin; and that many of the things which are 
to round out the character and efficiency of the future 
adult citizen are not pedagogical in their nature or are 
only remotely so. 

If we can agree upon these premises it will be not 
very difficult to classify and arrange most of the fail- 
ures and mistakes of our colleges, for they fall within 
the pedagogical, or the college community or the college 
home life departments, which have been running wild, 
without governor or fly wheel, and which can be brought 
back to their true relative positions and values only 
through an outside agency, the separate administrative 
department. 



156 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

And what is true of the colleges tends to be even 
more true of the undergraduates. If the doctors cannot 
agree, much more will the patients be at sea. If the 
colleges themselves have not been able to study out the 
meaning and relative values of their own departments 
and functions, much more are the undergraduates and 
their parents likely to become confused in this regard. 
Hence we find thie students also divided largely into 
three classes who respectively lay supreme importance 
upon the studious, the athletic or the social sides of the 
college state, and thereby lose sight of the true educa- 
tional symmetry and effectiveness of the course as a 
whole, but according to the individual needs of each 
student. 

Let us, then, get a' clear conception of the objective 
of the college. Intellectual training is not its chief ob- 
ject, but rather citizenship and the training for splendid 
and fruitful work as a citizen in the broadest sense in 
which the word can be used. The agencies by which 
this true and well-rounded citizenship is to be devel- 
oped are intellectual training and the college commun- 
ity and home lives. Of these, intellectual training is 
usually, but not always, the chief agency of the college 
in fulfilling its chief object — the promotion of citizen- 
ship. But the most learned pedant may fall far short 
of the perfection of citizenship which his college course 
might have wrought in him, and far short of the attain- 
ments in this regard of the men of lowest rank in his 
class, or of an unlearned and unlettered noncoUege 
fellow -citizen. 

If mere bookishness rather than citizenship be the 



Dominant Position oj Student Life Department 157 

chief thing, then let our boys be educated at home under 
tutors. Often this will cost less and the young men 
will have a greater and deeper book knowledge. But 
it will be at the expense of most that is best and most 
character-building, formative and rewarding in these 
four years. If, then, the individual student cannot af- 
ford to forego the ninety per cent of the student life 
of these four years, it is self-evident that more, much 
more, intelligent and sympathetic thought and effort 
must be spent upon this ninety per cent by the elders 
of all classes, and chiefly by those who are not the 
pedagogues, and especially by the alumni and parents. 
Ten instructors, working in relays, could not do the 
home work for its members which a good fraternity 
home does. But this very power for good warns us 
that we must guard against a like inherent power for 
evil. 

Let us not forget, then, that citizenship is the great 
object of the college; and let us be careful not to con- 
fuse this object and the agencies through which this 
is to be worked out. Especially let us make this fun- 
damental difference plain to all concerned in the college 
— faculty and students, trustees and alumni, parents 
and preparatory-school agencies. From this point of 
view the intellectual training and the college commun- 
ity and home lives take on new meanings — as mere 
agencies — and fall naturally into their proper places in 
the college reorganization plan. 

While we may admit that in the majority of cases 
the scholastic is the most important function of the col- 
lege, we must not overlook the fact that the effects of 



158 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

the college community and home lives may be quite 
as essential in making the clean and cultured problem 
solver, citizen and home-maker — especially as almost 
fifty per cent of our college undergraduates now go into 
business as their life work. This fact must not be 
ignored when we weigh the relative ultimate value to 
the average student of the pedagogic and student life 
factors of his college course. Nor must we overlook 
the fact that in the eyes of a large part of our college 
constituency — the students and their parents — the stu- 
dent life is relatively the most important factor, as it is 
in the eyes of the authorities of too many of our colleges. 
Admittedly, a considerable proportion of the students 
care most for the athletic and social elements of their 
course. But it is also as true that many parents have 
very little care for the scholastic side, but look upon 
the course as chiefly important because it tends to fit 
their children for eminence and success in business and 
political or social life. This is natural when we con- 
sider how little real value true scholastic improvement 
frequently has under the present college system, which 
too often subordinates true scholarliness and learning to 
athletics and social functions. 

It is vitally important to the instructional department 
to make plain the value of scholarship in the life of the 
future citizen. Else in too many cases the student life 
factors will continue to occupy, relatively, a too impor- 
tant position in the minds of parents and students. 
" For what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole 
world and lose his own soul?" Much more, what is an 
undergraduate profited if he shall gain a sixty per cent 



Dominant Position of Student Life Department 159 

marking system college diploma and lose the whole 
world of his future as a forceful citizen and clean man 
and true parent? Tens of thousands of such diplomas 
have been gotten in the college pedagogic department, 
and at the same time as many splendid futures have been 
lost — to the state, the community and the family — in 
the college community or the college home. In many 
many instances which was the greater, the ten per cent 
or the ninety? If you would know the true answer, 
study the college from the standpoint of the under- 
graduate and his future, and the college education from 
within the portals of the college home, for therein you 
will find the man himself; and the college sheepskin will 
appear at its true value in life training and life work. 

We have shown how little pedagogy has to do, under 
present conditions, with the student life factors of the 
college course; nay, rather, how pedagogy and the stu- 
dent life are often at odds and pulling in different di- 
rections. Hence it follows that some new force must 
be introduced into our college economy which shall have 
the distinct power and duty to analyze and set forth 
the real state of affairs, and to lay out and enforce a 
policy broad enough to cover, in the college organization, 
the rights, duties and privileges of the commonwealth, 
the institution, the faculty, the students collectively and 
individually, the parents, the fraternities, and all other 
persons or interests in any way concerned in the won- 
derful cosmos and congeries now known as a college or 
university. This new force must be independent of any 
of the other departments over which it must exercise 
supervision, yet with which it must work in the closest 



i6o The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

sympathy. To do its most effective work it must be 
self- centered and independent, and must be avowedly 
organized and recognized upon that plan. Otherwise it 
entirely loses its greatest source of power and efficiency. 
It is with this in view that we approach the subject of 
administration as it is now known and practiced in the 
business world, and the separate department of adminis- 
tration which must be organized and developed within 
our colleges if we are to get adequate results from our 
enormous investments therein, past and present, of time, 
money and men. 

But it is proper to point out here one great evil and 
wrong which has grown out of this failure to see whither 
the college was drifting. Boys used to go to college at 
twelve to fifteen/ but now it is considered unwise and 
unsafe to trust a boy at college before he is at least 
eighteen. Candid principals of high schools admit that 
many boys might easily be prepared to enter at sixteen 
or seventeen, but that they are kept marking time till 
they are old enough to be likely to "resist the tempta- 
tions of a college life." But, as we have seen, these are 
solely the temptations of the college community and 
home lives. Hence it is evident that the failure of the 
colleges to study and control the student life depart- 
ment has been the very place where the colleges have 
lost the confidence of the parents, the secondary-school 
teachers and the world in general; and that this loss of 
confidence is putting a handicap of one or two years 
upon many of our future citizens who think that they 
must take a college course — a handicap which does not 

• " Individual Training in Our Colleges," Chap. III. 



Dominant Position of Student Life Department i6i 

exist in the case of the young men who are considered 
quite fit to enter business or the trades at sixteen — and 
that this is one of the many points at which these public 
corporations fail to do their full duty as servants of the 
state. "College temptations," then, constitute an ele- 
ment in the life of the schoolboy, the undergraduate and 
the future citizen, which must be thoughtfully and can- 
didly considered in any college reorganization. But we 
must not overlook the fact that the present conditions 
have arisen and become regnant under the so-called 
pedagogic control of our colleges. We must look to see 
if we cannot find some new agency or department which 
can succeed where college pedagogy has failed so sig- 
nally. 

An examination of Who's Who in America shows that 
a very large proportion of our real leaders are college- 
bred men and that a college education still implies 
leadership. It makes no matter whether, with the im- 
provement of the high schools, this proportion will con- 
tinue to be as great in favor of the college-bred men. 
The fact remains that, more than ever before, the 
high-school boy studies and imitates the college under- 
graduate and his methods, and that in this sense the 
college has a far greater — and increasingly greater — 
influence over the youth of our land. The high-school 
boy is not particularly interested in the pedagogic side 
of the college but in the student life, and especially 
in the college community life as exemplified in inter- 
collegiate athletics, and to a less degree in the college 
home life as exemplified in the fraternities. The re- 
flex action of the college and of the college training out- 



1 62 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

side of the class room is therefore stronger than ever 
before upon the high-school boy, whether or not he 
is going to college. The thousands of young alumni 
yearly discharged into the body politic may too often be 
failures in the eyes of the elders but are quite as often 
demigods in the eyes of the lads. Neither elders nor 
lads have now any criterion by which they can surely 
judge the effects of the instructional department of the 
college upon the individual, but anyone can note the 
effects of the student life department. Hence it is this 
latter department which more and more becomes the 
standard by which the college is judged, and hence it is 
to be more carefully studied, watched and guarded by 
the college itself and all those interested in the college 
or its undergraduates. 

Having thus studied the evils which have grown up in 
the colleges, and fixed their exact location therein, let 
us turn our attention to the modern science of business 
administration, and see what it is and what it has ac- 
complished; and, further, whether the college mistakes 
and failures of the present and of the recent past have 
not been caused principally by the failure to develop a 
modern, distinct and coordinate administrative depart- 
ment able to seek out and cope with the stupendous and 
complicated social and educational problems of the 
huge institutions of higher learning of to-day, which lie 
quite outside the realm of pure pedagogy. 



PART III 

THE SEPARATE ADMINISTRATIVE 
DEPARTMENT 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE SCIENCE OF ADMINISTRATION AND THE FUNCTIONS 
OF THE ADMINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENT 

As music is not a matter of strings or keys or instru- 
ments, and as true oratory does not depend upon the 
language or color of the orator, so administration is not 
a matter of forms or method. In its higher sense, it 
is an atmosphere, an enfolding and life-giving power, 
which, consciously and unconsciously, acts upon and 
sways everyone within its field of action, and nerves him 
to do the best that is in him for the common cause. 
Under such an enthusiastic consensus, a required form 
is not a fetter, nor a prescribed method a manacle, but 
rather the best instrument so far devised for accom- 
plishing a common and desirable end, at a particular 
time and place. Since the use of that very instru- 
ment may elevate our ideals and ideas, it may itself 
thereby become obsolete and unfitted to accomplish 
the higher ends to which it has shown us the way; 
and hence as we use it, we must be seeking for and 
substituting new methods and instruments better fitted 
for the higher ends. 

Administration at its inception is the dominating 
personality of an individual rising above his fellows 
and, as master workman or proprietor, directly super- 

i6s 



1 66 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

intending and improving their joint work for the good 
of the common whole and of the separate parts. But 
as the organization grows larger, two needs develop. 
First, that the spirit of the chief organizer, rather 
than his personality, shall be disseminated through the 
whole, and thus reach the individual laborer or pro- 
ducer; for there are greater ends than mere organiza- 
tion and administration demanded of the chief, and it 
is important that his strength be conserved for these 
higher ends. Hence a system must be substituted for 
his personality, which henceforth must act indirectly 
and not directly, yet even more powerfully than before, 
for it has a larger number to affect. His personal in- 
fluence must be directly exerted upon a few and passed 
on from them to others. Second, there must be found 
a way in which this personal force may become a per- 
manent force, acting as truly and as surely as ever, 
notwithstanding a temporary or permanent absence of 
the initial personality. Hence the order of develop- 
ment of administration is first, the forceful individual; 
second, the substituted system; and finally, out of many 
such systems, considered in the light of experiments, a 
well-defined and widely used science. Administration, 
then, has become a science, and the personal agents 
through whom it has been worked out and through 
whom it works, have become experts and specialists, in 
the same sense as the doctors, lawyers, divines, teachers 
or other human exponents of any other well-developed 
science. 

New problems constantly arise in this new science, as 
in any other, both in its older fields and in the newer 



The Science oj Administration 167 

ones to which it must be applied. But this does not re- 
quire that the practical workers in these new fields must 
learn administration so that they shall be able to apply 
it within the field with which they are admittedly better 
acquainted than anyone else. A new cost system in a 
factory does not imply that the skilled mechanics shall 
leave their tools to put that system into effect. When 
the sleeping sickness of Africa was to be met and con- 
quered, it was not necessary or desirable to fetch a 
native African, thoroughly acquainted with jungle con- 
ditions, and educate him as a physician that he might 
go back and study this local disease. On the contrary, 
the great investigator and discoverer of germ diseases 
was sent to Africa that his experience in allied fields 
might be brought to bear upon local conditions. If 
new problems arise in any particular line of business, it 
is not necessary to educate, from among the practical 
experts of that business, men who shall become admin- 
istrators, so that they may study these new administra- 
tive problems. On the contrary, we seek out the most 
experienced administrator in other lines, that his wide 
experience may give him a broader view of problems of 
whose details he may have had no previous knowledge 
or experience. The science of administration has its 
well-defined rules and principles, and its well-trained 
experts and specialists capable of coping with any ad- 
ministrative problem, new or old, and wherever it may 
arise. Thus we perceive that administration is, in its 
essence, distinct from the rest of the business, and, in 
that sense, is a new graft upon the old stem, which, 
indeed, introduces new elements which soon become so 



1 68 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

much a part of the tree that they can be distinguished 
only by their fruit, which may be the most valuable 
which the tree bears. 

Here is where the colleges make their great error. 
They mistake questions which are administrative in their 
nature for pedagogical questions, and then imagine that 
if new problems of administration arise within their 
walls, their pedagogical experts must master and solve 
these questions. On the contrary, they should bring in 
administrative experts of wide experience to solve the 
administrative problems which necessarily must be 
simple and, in the main, must arise from the increased 
number of students, professors and courses, and the 
intricacy and hurly-burly of modern educational and 
social conditions. No other business or profession as- 
sumes that it is self-sufhcient in everything, and that it 
does not need outside administrative experts; but the 
college authorities take it for granted that their business 
is different from any other, and that they are in a class 
by themselves and hence must handle their own ad- 
ministrative problems. They erroneously assume that 
because they deal mostly with human factors their prob- 
lems are different from and, by their very nature, far 
more difficult than those presented in other fields. On 
the contrary, it is the human factor which is the most 
troublesome in every business affair. The administra- 
tive problems of the college should be, and are, far 
simpler than those of a great business; first, because 
they arise in one spot and are not scattered over wide 
areas in the hands of underlings; second, because they 
arise among and deal with our highest class of educated, 



The Science 0} Administration 169 

ambitious young men, and not among a crowd of for- 
eigners unacquainted with our language, customs or 
traditions; and, third, because the authorities have con- 
trol over the community and home life of the students, 
and so in one sense still reserve the right to act in loco 
parentis. The ill success is due, not to the inherent 
difficulty of the problems, but to the fact that the inter- 
ests involved — the education of our future problem 
solvers — are so important that any failure whatever 
therein is noticeable and blamable. 

Possibly my meaning can be made clearer by an actual 
example from the business world. The making of fine 
cigars is largely a matter of the manual skill of the in- 
dividual workman, although the cheaper brands may be 
made, more or less satisfactorily, by machinery. Hence 
when a company recently took over a large part of the 
cigar trade it was confronted, not so much with new 
problems of manufacture, as with new problems of ad- 
ministration. Undoubtedly, factory methods had to be 
systematized and improved, but even this was largely a 
matter of administration. The same hands continued 
to make the cigars — and especially the finer grades — in 
about the old way and with about the former skill. The 
really important questions arose in connection with ad- 
ditional capital and with the handling and selling of the 
goods after they were manufactured, and these problems 
were practically administrative and executive in their 
nature. 

But we must carefully distinguish between manu- 
facturing and manufacturing methods, and between sell- 
ing and selling methods. A man may be a fine cigar 



lyo The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

maker but know nothing about factory methods, while 
a good factory superintendent may not be a skilled work- 
man. Or a man may be a fine salesman, yet know 
nothing about the great sales plans of his employers, who, 
in turn, might make poor salesmen. Under this huge 
expansion in the cigar business, the manufacturing 
needed merely extension along lines already well under- 
stood in cigar-making; but the selling end required the 
application to the cigar trade, for the first time upon a 
very extensive scale, of administrative methods already 
well known in other lines of business, but adapted to new 
needs, and united with new methods evolved to meet 
problems which arose first in connection with this new 
business venture. 

This will illustrate one cause of the poor results during 
the recent years of great expansion in our colleges. We 
must clearly realise the difference between instruction 
and pedagogical methods or the science of pedagogy; 
and between college pedagogy and college administra- 
tion. College teaching, as such, is still the action of one 
mind upon another. It is not a system or science. One 
person may be an effective teacher, yet know nothing 
about the science of pedagogy ; another may be expert in 
the science and yet be a failure in actual teaching. 
Teaching is productive in its nature, but teaching meth- 
ods are largely administrative. The essential elements 
of good and fructifying teaching have not changed be- 
cause the older boarding-school college, drawing its 
pupils from private teachers, has been evolved into a 
college state or public servant, based upon a public- 
school system, and with greatly increased administrative 



The Science 0} Administration 171 

problems. The great teachers of the olden times would 
find their level to-day — if they were not overwhelmed by 
poor administrative methods ! 

The Germanization of our colleges, the elective system, 
intercollegiate athletics, the fraternities and many other 
disturbing elements of the modern college state, training 
for citizenship in all its planes, have not changed the es- 
sential elements of effective college teaching, but have 
merely introduced administrative problems, pedagogical 
in their nature, which must be met by the use of well- 
known administrative methods, adapted to college condi- 
tions, and supplemented by new methods evolved to 
meet administrative problems which arise for the first 
time in this new field. 

The college teacher is still its great producer. It was 
the duty of the college administration to insure that 
neither Germanization, nor electives, nor athletics, nor 
fraternities, nor anything else should have interfered 
with the tru,e productiveness of the college teacher. But 
it failed because it gave attention to trying to improve its 
manufacture, but not its manufacturing or administra- 
tive or executive methods. It set about to improve its 
mechanics, but neglected to improve the conditions 
under which they worked, and largely failed to handle 
properly the goods which they turned out. Our re- 
organization must insure that henceforth administration 
shall make all these innovations — each valuable in its 
proper plane — work together to improve the college 
teacher and his product. 

The difficulties of college administration will not be 
great if we do not persist in approaching them from the 



172 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

mistaken standpoint of present college sentiment and 
methods, which are based upon conditions which have 
largely passed away. 

The college authorities fail to appreciate that admin- 
istration is to-day as much a science as pedagogy, and 
in many senses a far greater and more exact science, and 
quite as well worthy to be taught in college as are many 
other courses now in the curriculum, and as much en- 
titled to a separate and honorable place in the college 
establishment as is the treasurer's office, which is ad- 
ministrative in its nature. 

Any system must be indeed scientific which can pro- 
duce uniform, satisfactory and maximum results in huge 
corporations like the United States Steel Corporation or 
the Standard Oil Company, which employ hundreds of 
thousands of men, in all parts of the world, in the most 
diverse industries and professions, and with hundreds 
of millions of capital. Either of these great corporations 
has an invested capital equal to that of all our institu- 
tions of higher learning, and directly or indirectly em- 
ploys as many men as there are students within all 
of our 850 universities, colleges and technical schools. 
The annual income of the United States Steel Corpora- 
tion exceeds the capital and plant which our 850 insti- 
tutions of higher learning have been able to accumulate 
in 270 years, and is fifteen times as large as their com- 
bined annual income; yet in one sense its administra- 
tive system is only a few years old. Moreover, this 
system is put to a proportionately greater test because 
its $600,000,000 of yearly business, under one admin- 
istration, is widely scattered, and not distributed among 



The Science oj Administration 173 

850 small and locally entire plants, each with unim- 
portant administrative problems, as is the case with our 
colleges. Assuredly if the science of modern adminis- 
tration can, without much difficulty and almost iner- 
rantly, dominate and systematize such divergent yet 
huge forces and powers, all working toward common 
ends, it will not prove unable to solve the compara- 
tively paltry problems of a college or university with 
a few hundreds or thousands of students and a few 
millions of capital and plant, located in a single town 
and around a single campus. 

We frequently hear that some one connected with the 
educational part of a college is a fine administrator. 
If we inquire closely we shall find that he indeed has an 
instinct for administration, but that, instead of being 
put at the head of a separate department, he is pitted 
against the inertia of the college ideals and traditions. 
The result is a slight movement of the mass and the 
exhaustion of the daring innovator, whose efforts are 
met with cries of " philistinism," "materialism," "red 
tape," "you are making a factory, a mill, of the college. 
Let us have at least one spot free from this business, 
machine spirit." In other words, in a college a good 
administrator is too often at a heavy discount and is 
voted a nuisance; while in business he is at a great pre- 
mium and called a prize. 

In business affairs the administrative department is 
accepted as something to be proud of, as an ally, as in- 
dispensable, and therefore to be fostered. Hence it is 
not choked off but championed, and every improve- 
ment in it is regarded as a common triumph, for it 



174 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

makes the work of each individual more effective and 
hence more rewarding. 

In a well-organized business concern, the push of the 
mass is against tolerating a poor administrative de- 
partment in whole or in part, and the chief men are ever 
working for a better administrative atmosphere, for 
they know that therein lies their own salvation. On 
the contrary, in our best organized colleges, the push of 
the mass is often against true administration — if there 
is anyone daring enough to propose some administra- 
tive innovations — and the chief men of the faculty are 
often the chief sinners in this regard. This is conclu- 
sively proved by the fact that up to the present time, so 
far as I can ascertain, no institution has organized its 
administrative features into a separate and coordinate 
department, with corresponding rights and powers for 
the general and individual good. It is self-evident that 
until such a department is formed and honestly and 
adequately handled, administration can never have a 
fair test in our colleges. 

In many faculties there is too much slurring of the 
other departments or teachers, very much as in the 
older schools of medicine, which were all measurably 
wrong, but each unable to see anything good in the 
others. Yet the newer medicine is principally made up 
of the things most violently opposed and denounced in 
the near past, and the things most tenaciously fought 
for by each school in the past are those which it now 
most vehemently disowns. A few heart-to-heart talks 
with members of a college faculty soon reveal this con- 
dition to a business man. There can never be any true 



The Science of Administration 175 

administration in our colleges until it is in itself a 
desideratum for which all will work, and if necessary 
gladly sacrifice something; nor until it is no longer re- 
garded by some influential professors as a devilment of 
those ungodly and uneasy souls who "have no notion of 
scholarship or its needs"; or, as one old professor de- 
lighted to phrase it, of " Christianity and culture." We 
shall see that because of modern conditions a separate 
administrative department in our huge institutions is 
the only method through which we can ever hope to re- 
store in many of them anything like Christianity and 
culture; or, in other words, a pure college atmosphere 
and clean college homes, making for better intellectual 
conditions and higher scholarliness. 

Yet administration, no matter how elaborately or- 
ganized, which lacks the inspiring, cooperating genius 
is dead and useless. "It is the spirit that quickeneth. 
The flesh profiteth nothing." And until the spirit has 
made it alive, and put every part of the college behind 
it, there can never be true administration in our col- 
leges in the sense in which it quickens every part of a 
business concern. As we proceed we shall discover 
some of the ways in which the spirit of true adminis- 
tration has not only quickened but revolutionized our 
modern business world. 

So long, then, as we stick to the notion that, in the 
colleges, administration must remain a mere adjunct to 
the whims of the pedagogical department, we cannot, 
from the very nature of the case, expect to develop an 
adequate, coordinate and up-to-date administrative de- 
partment. The very statement of this case should con- 



176 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

vince us of its correctness. But we shall soon have its 
truth established by our study of the science of admin- 
istration as it has gradually grown up in all large affairs 
except in the colleges; and thereby the shortsightedness 
of the college policy of chaining administration to the 
department of instruction will be demonstrated. 

This point is well covered in the following letter from 
a dean of a Western university. Notice how the troubles 
spoken of would be minimized by a separate depart- 
ment of administration. 

"The faults which you mark in Eastern institutions are 
even more pronounced in some ways among our Western 
colleges. Their extreme youth, unprecedented growth, and 
more limited funds have combined to increase the diflficul- 
ties of an administrative type. The college professor has 
not only to attend to his teaching but to lay, in a year, foun- 
dations as extensive as those which the older institutions 
of the East have been a half century or more in construct- 
ing. The faculty creates committees to organize this work 
and that; for the Western institution is jealous that it shall 
afiford all the opportunities of the older universities. The 
committee is urged to investigate thoroughly and to organ- 
ize along the most successful lines. The faculty applies 
personal and official pressure, with the result that the in- 
dividual members of the committee spend an entirely un- 
necessary amount of time in securing data and attempting 
to build up a system, for the execution of which there is no 
sufficient provision. Consequently, faculty members are as- 
signed to further duties in carrying out the plan of organi- 
zation, and the administrative burden, like the Old Man 
of the Sea, only winds itself tighter about the neck of the 
unfortunate pedagogue. 

"If your suggested revision is needed anywhere in the 
world it is urgently demanded here in the West. Our large 
classes and small faculties — too much to do and too little to 
do with — have confined administrative expenditures to the 
minimum possible limit. A few cheap men, without any 



The Science of Administration 177 

reasonable possibility of carrying out the interests entrusted 
to them, constitute the entire administrative force. Yet the 
teachers begrudge even the small amount of money which 
goes to maintain this department. They often find the pur- 
chases made by a purchasing agent more expensive than 
those previously made under their own management, or at 
least less effective, since they are supplied with poor material 
or cheap apparatus that will not answer the purpose for 
which it was intended and thus becomes promptly an entire 
loss to the institution. I might expand ad lib on this topic." 

As is here shown, and as we shall frequently see, 
college administration involves, more and more, ques- 
tions which are distinctly extrapedagogical. Hence any 
system which is under the control of the pedagogical 
branch is inherently weak and upon a wrong basis. 
Administration should be independent of the peda- 
gogical department and directly answerable to the ex- 
ecutive, who in his turn is directly responsible for in- 
suring that the institution gives a training for efficient 
citizenship rather than merely for a diploma, as a 
pseudonym for scholarliness. 

But, again and again, let us repeat that forms and 
methods are not administration any more than the 
level and compass are engineering. All these things 
are but the tools and implements of the underlying 
science. Administration, so called, may be essentially 
false and harmful in the same sense that law may be 
bad or theology false, possibly because they have be- 
come antiquated and inapplicable to modern conditions ; 
or as a medicine may be efficacious when applied exter- 
nally which would be poison if taken internally ; or as a 
drug may be safely put into the stomach which would 
cause blindness if put into the eye. In the science of 



178 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

administration, as in all others, a little knowledge is 
dangerous. And right here some of our colleges have 
grievously and frequently erred. They have called in 
accountants and others, and under their advice have in- 
stalled some system of forms and blanks taken from a 
bank or store, and have called this administration; and 
when the ill-advised experiment has failed, as it was 
bound to, they have condemned all business adminis- 
tration as inherently inapplicable to college affairs. As 
well might a farsighted man put on nearsighted glasses, 
or a slightly nearsighted man put on powerful glasses, 
and condemn all the work of the optician. Indeed, ad- 
ministration is very like the science of the optician in 
that it is largely a matter of fine adjustment. As the 
average eye can usually do better with no glasses than 
it can with those which are not properly adjusted to it, 
90 a college may be better off with substantially no ad- 
ministration than with a method not at all adjusted to 
its peculiar wants and conditions. 

Every science, if wrongly understood and applied, is 
dangerously capable of doing harm. The trouble with 
our colleges has been that they have not realized that 
administration was a science, and to be studied and ap- 
plied as such; and that a science presupposes that its 
problems have been thoroughly studied and diagnosed 
before a scientific solution can be proposed. Ill-ad- 
vised administration in a college may have the most 
disastrous results, but this is no reason for condemning 
all administration, or for refusing to understand that 
college affairs require a modern administrative system 
and department especially adapted to their needs, based 



The Science oj Administration 179 

upon the underlying principles of the science, yet not 
necessarily following strictly any particular forms or 
methods theretofore used in other forms of business. 
College administration presents a new field and must 
be studied as such. As we have developed railroad ad- 
ministration, and factory practice, and department-store 
methods, and banking principles, so we must evolve 
college administration and the college administrative de- 
partment, and they closely approximate to good factory 
practice. 

There are two paramount objects which true admin- 
istration accomplishes, one affirmative and the other 
negative. In the first place, it collates and compares 
the results of its own work and of the work of others over 
which it presides, and thus ascertains the true value of 
each particular of these results, and therefore is able to 
winnow the chaff from the wheat. But, secondly, and 
quite as important, it makes a record of what has been 
done and how, which renders it unnecessary to keep 
doing over and over again the pioneer work which is 
primitive and unrewarding. Thus it is kept from slip- 
ping backward, and maintains any heights to which it 
has once attained; and at the same time has a chart by 
which to steer its future course. As has been shown al- 
ready, and as we shall see more clearly hereafter, the 
present college administrative methods do not produce 
clear and comprehensive records on a wide and uni- 
form plan, nor collect and compare them in a broad 
and scientific way. Hence the present system is primi- 
tive, with its best minds working over and over, in a 
desultory way, upon the same primary administrative 



i8o The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

problems, instead of having these so simplified that a 
clerk, at ten dollars a week, could attend to them. In 
business, important accounting and other administra- 
tive problems which were worked out by geniuses within 
the past twenty-five years are now relegated to mere 
clerks. But the best administrative minds in our col- 
leges are still working over tables and petty details 
which could and should be attended to more satisfac- 
torily by ordinary assistants. Let us, then, more care- 
fully examine administrative methods and problems as 
they have been developed and treated in the colleges and 
in business affairs. We shall thus discover whether it 
will not be essential to a successful reorganization of 
our colleges to apply modern administrative methods, 
through a modern and separate administrative depart- 
ment, to many of the college problems which under 
present methods, and treated as pedagogical rather than 
administrative, seem almost unsolvable. 



CHAPTER XIV 

ADMINISTRATION, DISCIPLINE AND ORDER IN THE 
EARLIER COLLEGES 

There were no questions of administration worth 
mentioning in the very small boarding-school college of 
the ecclesiastical period, with its few score of pupils 
housed and reciting in one or two buildings; any more 
than in its contemporaneous colonial shop or store, with 
its one or two journeymen or clerks. So there were few 
administrative problems when a band of neighboring 
frontiersmen gathered to fight the Indians, and fur- 
nished their own weapons, accoutrements and pro- 
visions; or in the older shipyard, with twenty or thirty 
men who could, nevertheless, in a few months turn out 
the highest class of clipper ship then known to the world. 

Teaching is largely the direct impress of one mind 
upon another, and this is most easily and surely ob- 
tained where the contact between these minds is con- 
tinued, constant and direct. This is truest in youth, 
and less so as the recipient mind becomes more thor- 
oughly trained and better able to think clearly for itself. 
Thus in a small secondary school, where the teacher and 
the pupil are, as it were, caged together, day after day, 
and year after year, the contact is direct and the results 
definite. The opposite is found in the college class, and 
especially in the college lecture course, with occasionally, 



1 82 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

as in Harvard, 400 men in the course,' some of whom 
cannot even hear the lecturer. In such cases, and es- 
pecially where the instructors are frequently changed, 
the personal contact must often be very slight. 

The fundamental relation of the effective teacher to 
his pupil is substantially the same in all colleges. The 
great teacher is bound to find his place and his pupils. 
The variable factors, which affect the work of the ordin- 
ary or average or inexperienced instructor in our col- 
leges, are to be found in the administration, and in the 
atmosphere in which the student must work, that is, in 
the student life department. Upon the college admin- 
istrative department must fall the burden of making 
sure that in our modern huge institutions there is such 
a constant and close contact between teacher and taught 
as shall give the same kind of results as in the earlier and 
simpler days. 

Compare the administrative problems of a modem 
university with those of Dartmouth under her first 
president: 

"In this condition Wheelock was at once the man of des- 
tiny and of service. All functions were performed by him. 
He was the universal executive — scholastic, civil, educational, 
domestic. In one of the college buildings was kept a store. 
Upon him the care of it fell. He was the farmer, the miller, 
and the lumberman at the saw-mill. The commons was a 
branch of his family kitchen; of it he was steward. He was 
treasurer, professor of divinity, and pastor of the church. 
He essentially was the Board of Trustees and the faculty. 
If any student was to be reprimanded, he was the one to 
deal the blow; if the gates of the college property were out 
of order, he was the one to mend them; and if the pigs did 

• "Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 177, 404. 



Administration in the Earlier Colleges 183 

damage to the neighbors, he was the one to put the pigs 
back in their pen, to settle damages, and to pour balm on 
the injured feelings. These and similar works, with neces- 
sary changes of emphasis, were the works of Wheelock until 
his death in 1779." * 

Nor must we confuse administration with discipline. 
In the earlier college the discipline was recognized as 
part of the student life and applied as such, and it still 
belongs in that department, and not to the pedagogical 
department. In a properly conducted college, disci- 
pline should be about as frequent as it is in well-con- 
ducted church or factory — and not much more so. 
There is no reason why the young men themselves, and 
the agencies affecting them in their college life and 
college home, should not do away with questions of dis- 
cipline or solve the few cases that may arise. 

After making due allowance for modern social 
changes, and for the different conditions which now 
surround the students, the college administrative prob- 
lems are those which come from increase in numbers in 
students, courses and faculty, and of the professions or 
callings of our graduates, and from the evolution of the 
college school into the college state. The colleges have 
tried to fit too many men for too many callings in too 
short a time, considering the amount of stuffing and 
smattering now falsely called a liberal education. We 
cannot agree even yet upon what the college is, nor what 
its courses should be, nor how they should be taught; 
nor what are the functions, educationally, of the college 
community life and home life; nor the true interrelations 

' "Higher Education in America," by Charles F. Thwing, p. 141. 



184 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

and interdependence of the various departments of the 
college; nor upon scores of other fundamental things, 
administrative and not pedagogical in their nature, upon 
which we must substantially agree if we are to make true 
progress toward an effective reorganization. 

We have landed in topsy-turvydom, and our scrap- 
heap education has left us with an immense college 
waste heap, which we have never analyzed or studied 
through a proper administrative department and in a 
modern way — or else our mistakes would long ago have 
been set baldly before us, and greatly lessened in num- 
ber and importance because we knew what caused them, 
and our best administrative minds could have gone on 
to something higher and more worthy of their caliber. 
Hence we must study what our business concerns are 
doing and have done, so that we may know what our 
colleges might and should have done under much more 
favorable circumstances and with much more intelligent 
agents. Thus we can discover what the colleges ought 
to do in the future. 



CHAPTER XV 

HOW SHALL WE REORGANIZE THE COLLEGE? THE NEW 
PRIMARY UNIT 

To one experienced in business reorganizations, the 
answer to this question seems simple enough as to the 
principle to be followed, while admittedly the applica- 
tion of that principle must be difficult. But if the 
principle upon which we are to proceed can be estab- 
lished, its application is only a matter of time and work, 
and usually, as in the adoption of the United States con- 
stitution, of compromises. 

The first essential of a successful reorganization is an 
analysis of the business itself and of its strong and weak 
points, and thereafter of the factors which led to the 
failure, and thus to the need of reorganization. Ample 
provision must then be made against the baleful in- 
fluence of these factors in the future. Carrying out this 
method, we find that, from the very outset, there must 
be an entire change of the point from which we shall 
view the college plant, using this word "plant" in a 
very broad sense, rather than in the narrow sense, as 
applying only to real estate and machinery. We should 
make the teacher, not the pupil, the unit of primary 
consideration and of determining the nature and kind 
of output. As water of itself can rise no higher than 
its source, so in this sense the pupil cannot rise above 

185 



1 86 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

his teacher. In another sense, the pupil can and often 
does rise above his teacher, and this is the joy of all 
inspiring and virile instructors. But usually it is the 
inspiration of the teacher and his methods and train- 
ing which enables the pupil to surpass his instructor. 
Hence we should consider first the efficiency of the 
latter, and improve this as being the true source of the 
pupil's scholarliness and subsequent scholarship. 

In other words, the college must now learn to con- 
sider, as its primary unit, the capacity of its plant — 
that is, of its teaching force, individually and collec- 
tively, in connection with its libraries, laboratories, 
recitation rooms and other material equipment. Under 
this plan each instructor would be considered and rated, 
by the coordinate and coequal administrative depart- 
ment, as a part of the college plant (a) principally and 
primarily as to the amount of time which he must have 
to himself to conserve and develop to the utmost, and 
keep in thorough repair and highest working order, his 
intellectual and teaching powers, so that he may be 
capable of the best possible work for the students and 
the institution; (b) how much time in addition he can, 
to the greatest advantage, spend upon teaching; and (c) 
how many students he can teach most efficiently within 
the time allotted to teaching. But this is expressing a 
layman's opinion upon pedagogical matters, and so may 
properly be reenforced by expert opinion. Dr. James 
H. Canfield says: 

"There is no profession in which a man goes stale more 
quickly or more easily than in teaching. It requires rather 
unusual independence of outlook to see and believe that 



The New Primary Unit 187 

positive teaching power is the one thing needful, the one 
imperative demand, and in the end must be the one standard 
by which recognition and advancement are secured. And 
it requires conscientious class-room work, quickened and 
enlightened by continued efforts for self-improvement, to 
keep a man fresh and effective as a teacher." 

At this point we should make sure that our frequent 
allusions to business methods and factory practice do 
not mislead us. In business it is the net result, the 
ultimate success, the finished product, however diverse, 
which are held constantly in view. In one establish- 
ment the labors of thousands of men may be concentrated 
for years upon the construction of a Lusitania, which 
shall surpass in size any ship theretofore built and prove 
the applicability of the turbine engine upon the largest 
scale. In another establishment the same number of 
men may be employed in turning out mihions of machine- 
made products of a standard type. But to insure in 
either case the best net results for the time and labor ex- 
pended, there must be the best factory methods whether 
the final product is to be a Lusitania, or 5,000 automo- 
biles or 10,000,000 shovels or spades. But the great 
danger is that our colleges, because of their size and poor 
factory practice, will turn out large quantities of factory- 
made goods instead of a smaller number of well-trained 
individuals. There is too much tendency to be satis- 
fied if fifty or sixty per cent of the entering class are sent 
forth at the end of four years as holders of low-grade 
and meaningless diplomas, and too little determination 
that the institution shall produce individuals trained to 
their utmost for the highest future service as citizens. 
It is because the reorganized colleges should get the best 



1 88 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

possible results out of each individual that I advocate 
the adoption of business methods and factory practice 
in the form of a new college administrative department. 
Only thus can the best results be gotten out of the work 
of the instructors of whatever grade. 

In this new view of our teaching force as our primary 
unit we are merely following good factory practice. A 
manufacturer or business man carefully considers and 
conserves his plant. He first asks, " How can I gather 
together the most modern and improved machinery 
and keep it in the highest state of efficiency? " and 
next, "How much first-class work can I get out of 
it?" 

That is to say, he regards as of primary importance 
his plant and capital, which are the chief factors which 
limit his ability to turn out first-class product, and then 
proceeds to run this plant to the utmost of its economi- 
cal production ; but he always keeps in full view the con- 
dition and safe capacity of his plant. It is a cardinal 
principle that, at any cost, machinery must be kept in 
first-class order and repair; for here "a stitch in time 
saves nine," both in the ultimate cost of repairs and in 
impaired product. It is the rankest folly to allow a 
plant to run down or be overworked ; or to fail to replace 
out-of-date or useless machinery with new; or, as one 
business and college friend suggests, "a scrap heap for 
the second-class machinery is one of the economies of a 
first-class factory." 

The prime importance which manufacturers attach to 
maintaining and repairing their plant and machinery can 
be seen in their annual reports. 



The New Primary Unit 189 

For example, during the year ending December 31, 1906, 
the United States Steel Corporation expended for main- 
tenance, renewals and extraordinary re- 
placement, the sum of $48,333,089.37 
which in this particular was an increase 
of twenty-nine per cent over the expen- 
ditures of the preceding year. After 
these and other deductions the company 
showed net earnings for 1906 of 156,624,273 . 18 
out of which it further appropriated for 
sinking funds, depreciation and extin- 
guishment funds, and for construction 86,565,333.05 
and for dividends on its common and 
preferred stock, about forty per cent as 
much, or 35,385,724.00 

In other words, the sums expended for maintenance, re- 
newals, replacements, depreciation, etc., were four times 
those paid out in dividends, and approximately one quarter 
of the total gross income. 

So also in railroading. The Pennsylvania Lines west of 
Pittsburg earned in the year 

ending December 31, 1906, $46,036,806.22 

as follows: 

From freight traffic 36,323,405 . 13 

From passenger and express 
traffic, transportation of 
mails and all other mis- 
cellaneous sources 9,713,401 .09 $46,036,806.22 

Yet out of these earnings 
the Railroad Company 
expended for the main- 
tenance of way and struc- 
tures, and for the main- 
tenance of equipment 14,007,632 .41 

Or over thirty per cent of its 
total receipts, and one 
hundred and forty-three 
per cent of all receipts 
outside of freight. 



190 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

It has already been shown that the capital of our col- 
leges and universities is approximately $600,000,000 and 
their annual income $40,000,000. But they would be 
horrified at the suggestion that, like the great industrial 
corporations, they should devote twenty-five per cent of 
their gross income, or Uke the great railroads, thirty 
per cent of their gross income, to repairs and replace- 
ments of their teaching machines, and for sinking and 
reserve funds, etc. 

The college has no vast depreciation or reserve funds, 
and no ability, on present lines, to accumulate such 
funds out of current receipts. Such funds must come, 
if at all, from gifts; that is, from new drafts upon its 
friends, and the chief executive must devote his energies 
largely to this extramural work of raising fresh capital 
rather than to his legitimate work within the walls. 

Only after he is sure that his plant is in proper condi- 
tion to do its best work does the careful manufacturer 
proceed to make it turn out its maximum of marketable 
and first-class product — and no more. He does not 
overload his machinery, or ask a hundred-ton-per-day 
plant to produce two hundred tons per day. Overload- 
ing the machinery inevitably leads to deterioration (a) 
of the plant, (b) of the product, and (c) of the reputation 
and prestige with customers and the public, that is, of 
the good will and trade name, which oftentimes are the 
manufacturer's most important assets. He knows that 
such deterioration is too heavy a price to pay for the 
added output. 

But our colleges always have reversed and still per- 
sistently reverse this salutary rule as to caring for their 



The New Primary Unit 191 

plant and limiting their output. Whenever any institu- 
tion has done unusually good work or offered unusual 
opportunities, an undue number of students have 
crowded to its doors and have been meekly received 
upon some theory — criminal in its foolishness — that col- 
lege machinery is governed by different rules than any 
other, and may be overloaded to the breaking point, re- 
gardless of the evil effects (a) on the teaching force it- 
self, or (b) on the student product, or (c) on the reputa- 
tion of the institution. Thus has been caused a terrible 
waste of teachers, pupils and good name; and, as we 
have seen, the college does not, like the careful manu- 
facturer, provide any huge maintenance, depreciation, 
reserve or sinking funds out of which to make good this 
wastage. 

If a college is doing unusually good work with 250 
students, it is pretty sure to allow its enrollment to in- 
crease to 350 or 500 without any corresponding increase 
in its capital and plant; that is, in its endowment and 
teaching facilities, which should have been increased in 
a geometrical proportion before allowing any increase in 
the student body. It is easy to multiply examples of 
this mistaken policy on the part of the colleges. Two 
will suffice.* 

COLLEGE A 

Productive College Income per 

Year. Students. Funds. Staff. Income. Student. 

'oi/'o2 642 $2,429,594 70 $181,422 $281 

'o2/'o3 686 2,40o.ocx3 74 146.900 214 

'b3/'o4 870 2,356.455 79 181. 173 208 

'o4/'o5 926 2,600.000 80 i8i.ooo 195 

> From Annual Reports of U. S. Commissioner of Education. 



192 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

COLLEGE B 

Productive College Income per 

Year. Freshman. Total. Funds. Staff. Income, Student. 

'02/'03 279 1015 $1,232,344 76 $253,281 $250 

'o3/'o4 31 r 1033 1,191.796 77 233.367 225 

'o4/'os 358 1067 1,261.444 79 235.977 221 

'o5/'o6 402 1213 1,296.998 85 256.854 213 

This may be stated in another form. Suppose that 
a college is doing work with 500 students at an annual 
cost per student of $300 ; of which each student contrib- 
utes $100 in tuition while the endowment contributes 
the remaining $200. That is, the total college income 
of $150,000 is admirably providing for the education 
of 500 undergraduates. If the number of students is 
increased to 1,000 without any increase of endowment 
returns, we shall have an income of $200,000, made up 
of $100,000 from tuition (1,000 students at $100 each) 
and $100,000 from endowment income; an average of 
only $200 per student. 

Unless this increase in the number of students is ac- 
companied by a commensurate increase in endowment 
or other income, we find that the growth of the student 
body is attended with a decreased income per student, 
and a decreased return per capita for the faculty, 
although the latter's work must be relatively greater. 

Moreover, this strain is sure to come unequally and 
unfairly upon the members of the faculty. The best 
men, whose work has made the college successful, are 
apt to be overworked, while courses of other men, draw- 
ing equal pay, are neglected, and these latter become an 
actual drag upon those who have chiefly contributed to 
the improvement of the college. If the situation had 
been clearly analyzed the fault would have been found 



The New Primary Unit 193 

in the lack of an adequate administrative department. 
But the unfortunate results have been plainly evident, 
and have prejudiced many bright minds against becom- 
ing college teachers, and have turned them toward 
business or the professions, where at least there 
is appreciation and financial reward for high-grade 
work. 

The professors who have made possible the successful 
working of a college should be rewarded by better pay 
and more time for self- improvement rather than by in- 
creasing their burdens and overworking them to the 
breaking point — even if this reward to the teachers de- 
mands a substantial reduction in the numbers of each 
entering class until the capital and plant have fully 
caught up with additional requirements. The successful 
teacher and not the successful coach should get the ad- 
ditional compensation; for it has too often happened 
that a large increase in the number of students has been 
felt to justify and require the employment of a much 
higher-priced athletic coach, but a lower scale of com- 
pensation for the instructors, especially in the junior 
grades. Certainly this is a fair example of how the col- 
lege itself has placed an undue premium upon athletics 
— the college community life — at the expense of the 
pedagogical forces and intellectual worth. 

The wise merchant or manufacturer rewards those 
employees who have made his success possible, and upon 
whom he must depend for continued prosperity. He 
increases their pay, takes off the burdens of detail, makes 
them feel that their good work is appreciated and that 
they are reserved for higher and better positions; and 



194 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

not that they are to be punished for their contribution to 
his success by having additional and more grinding work 
put upon them. 

In the reorganized college the good work of the 
teacher will have first consideration, and not the wishes 
of that percentage of the student body who have been 
attracted because a professional coach — ^with plenty of 
money and the faculty and college sentiment to aid him 
— ^has been able to turn out successful athletic teams; 
and it will be one of the chief objects of the administra- 
tive department to insure that this policy of the college 
is carried out. 

The fact that the modern college plan of "everything 
for the student and intercollegiate athletics, and the 
devil take the faculty," has been found wanting, and not 
conducive to fostering true scholarliness or the good 
name of Alma Mater, is another reason why it has be- 
come necessary to consider a thorough reorganization 
of the college. 

The third annual report of the Carnegie Foundation 
(p. 75) says: 

"The greatest obstacle in the past has been the ever- 
present competition for numbers, which is the great demor- 
alization in all American education." 

This is here treated as a simple business proposition. 
The waste of future citizen material at this point in our 
college factory is unnecessary and irreparable, and here 
is one of the reasons why our colleges have not brought 
forth more great productive scholars. One phase of 
this waste can be illustrated. In Germany the gymna- 
sium carries a boy to about the end of our sophomore 



The New Primary Unit 195 

year, and up to this point his studies have been dis- 
tinctly what we would call high-school work, under high- 
school teachers and methods. When he goes to the uni- 
versity he enters upon his professional course, under 
teachers whose aims and methods are entirely different 
from those of the gymnasium. The German university 
professors are men who have made great names for 
themselves by original work in their own departments, 
or else they would not be where they are; and they have 
probably won, also, civic and social distinction. In 
other words, in Germany there is the sharpest distinc- 
tion between high-school and professional or university 
teaching standards and methods, and one who would be- 
come a professor in the university must be a producer of 
high rank. 

This was essentially the original idea of our earliest 
colleges. "There was comparatively little below the 
college, and almost nothing above it." Its teaching 
was that of the professional school and it trained di- 
rectly for professional life as it was then understood. 
Hence the instructors had the honor of being among the 
chief divines and logicians in the community, for theol- 
ogy and logic were the supreme professional training. 
Any further vocational training was not in a distinct 
school, but in the home of a pastor or the office of a 
lawyer or doctor. But after awhile our modern idea 
of a distinct professional school began to be engrafted 
upon our colleges, and their courses had more and more 
a tendency to become mere extensions of high-school 
courses, and their teachers and methods merely a sub- 
limated and higher preparation for the professional 



196 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

school. At this point the college professors began to be 
put at a distinct disadvantage. They had many of the 
drawbacks of the high-school teachers and few of the 
outside opportunities of the professional schools. More 
and more the tendency was to make them drudges in- 
stead of producers. Every year we turn out a fine crop 
of prospective college instructors of great promise and 
with high ambitions and gifts. They feel capable of 
doing good original work and of bettering the methods 
of the average professor under whose instructions they 
have sat. But thirty years before, that average pro- 
fessor had had the same capability and ambitions, until 
these were killed out of him by the poor administrative 
methods and bad factory practice of our colleges. Un- 
less we thoroughly reorganize our college practice, each 
new crop of prospective college professors must be be- 
numbed and stunted by the very drudgery that a suc- 
cessful start will entail. Furthermore, the almost cer- 
tain extension of the preceptorial system, in varying 
forms, is sure to be attended with great danger that it 
will dwarf the coming race of pedagogues unless this in- 
sidious danger is most earnestly studied and guarded 
against. The same process which has put the college 
professor between the professional and the high-school 
teachers will tend to create a permanent class of pre- 
ceptors and drudges below the college professors; just 
as in a large bank few employees ever become more than 
poorly paid bank clerks with large responsibility in 
routine lines. We are likely thus to put a further pre- 
mium on our constant waste, through poor administra- 
tive methods, of high-class pedagogical material which 



The New Primary Unit 197 

is capable of doing good original and teaching work in 
its chosen field. 

The Briggs Report says of Harvard's assistant in- 
structors : 

"As the number of men assigned to each assistant is 
large, he can give little time to each, and that only at long 
intervals, usually seeing each of his men for ten or fifteen 
minutes at a time about once a month. ... As the uni- 
versity is now organized these assistants are necessarily 
young men and therefore without experience in teaching." ' 

The Carnegie Foundation calls attention to the fact 
that, while the teaching forces of Columbia and Harvard 
are practically alike in number, Columbia annually pays 
about $300,000 more to her instructing stafif than does 
Harvard, and that the difference chiefly is "in the sal- 
aries paid in the teaching grades below faculty rank. 
The average instructor at Harvard receives $753 a year 
less than the average instructor at Columbia." ^ Such 
a condition is unfair for the student, but immeasurably 
more so for the assistants who are supposedly picked 
men. What inspiration to such men is there in seeing 
each of his pupils " for ten or fifteen minutes at a time, 
about once a month?" Or what inspiration to the 
pupils, when the instructors use their poorly paid posi- 
tions as a makeshift to enable them to pursue their own 
studies? 

It will become clearer, as we proceed, that these are 
strictly administrative and not pedagogical questions, 
and must be solved through an up-to-date college ad- 

> "Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 176, 402, 403. 
' Carnegie Foundation Bulletin, No. Two, p. 38. 



198 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

ministrative department conducted on the best modern 
business principles. 

The inherent difference between the teaching methods 
of college and professional schools, and the chaos and 
waste which have resulted from the attempt to cover 
graduate and undergraduate work in the same classes 
in our so-called universities, have been very clearly set 
forth in Flexner's "The American College," in Chapter 
V. But the evils at this point are not pedagogical, for 
the teaching in itself is admittedly becoming better each 
year. Any good manufacturer would see that these 
questions were administrative rather than pedagogical; 
that is, whether the raw material was being treated in 
the right way by the proper machinery. It is not a 
question of whether one factory has the proper facilities 
to turn out car springs and another the right machinery 
to turn out watch springs; but rather whether, because 
of lack of proper administration, the watch spring ma- 
terial has been delivered to the car factory, and the 
watch factory is attempting to hammer out car springs. 
It is plainly evident that, in such a case, it is the ad- 
ministration and not the machinery which is at fault. 

Only when we reorganize our college factories so as to 
make and keep our instructors — as our chief primary 
units — of the highest grade, and in the highest state of 
efficiency, and wjth constant opportunities and incen- 
tives for self-improvement, and all this in charge of a 
coordinate, sympathetic and earnest department look- 
ing for results, shall we get anything like the product of 
which our institutions are capable. Then only will it 
be possible to thoroughly study college conditions and 



The New Primary Unit 199 

methods so as to determine exactly the true place of the 
college in our system of higher education. Then only 
can we restore the older conditions when the position of 
a college professor carried with it a civic and social 
honor which, in part at least, compensated for its hard- 
ships and manifold deprivations. More and more we 
must, through our separate administrative department, 
restore this feature to college pedagogy. Thus the re- 
organized colleges can regain their hold on the better 
class of young men as teachers, and keep them to their 
best work, since this alone will bring them the highest 
honors. This phase of the college problem is being 
carefully studied by the Carnegie Foundation. Some of 
its conclusions will be found in Appendix No. IV. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE NATURE OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION AND AD- 
MINISTRATIVE DEPARTMENTS 

This may be well called the age of organization, re- 
organization and system, for the paramount questions in 
all large affairs are now those of administration and or- 
ganization. A large but poorly organized factory or 
mercantile establishment is sure to end in bankruptcy. 
Our modern railroad and shipping companies are mar- , 
vels of intricate and perfected administrative and execu- 
tive systems. Administrative problems arise when the 
number of employees is greatly increased, and, as well, 
when intricate and expensive machinery is introduced to 
take the place of many men. There are few such prob- 
lems where 5,000 men are scattered in groups of five 
through a thousand shops, but the questions become 
many and difficult when these 5,000 workmen are 
gathered into one establishment and under one manage- 
ment. In the same manner an intricate machine han- 
dled by one man, but doing the work of 100 unskilled 
workmen, adds to the administrative difficulties of the 
concern. It may not require so many men to work it, 
but it has a large first cost upon which it must earn in- 
terest, depreciation and replacement charges, and hence 
it must not stand idle; it has a large producing capacity, 



Nature o} Administrative Departments 201 

and hence must be kept supplied with a larger amount 
of raw material; and its larger output must be constantly, 
economically and advantageously disposed of. Thus a 
modern and efficient machine does away with some of 
the lower forms of administrative problems arising in 
connection with unskilled workmen, but gives rise to a 
more difficult kind connected with skilled and high- 
priced labor and intricate and costly machinery. 

So it is with our colleges. Their problems increase 
geometrically, not only with the number of their students 
and faculty, but also with the number and intricacy 
of their courses and the higher grade of their work. 
Within sixty years the students of Columbia have in- 
creased about thirty fold and her faculty almost fifty 
. fold. But no one would think of suggesting that her 
educational and administrative problems had increased 
merely thirty or fifty fold. It would be nearer the truth 
to say that there are more than fifty new kinds of such 
problems which were undreamed of sixty years ago ; and 
that each of these is fifty times more difficult than any of 
the earlier period. We must fully understand this so 
that we may appreciate that our new college administra- 
tive department must be under the charge of adminis- 
trative and not pedagogical experts. Very few of the 
problems of the quasi state and public servant which we 
discuss herein have any strict connection with pedagogy, 
pure and simple. They belong rather to the student life, 
or to the financial, board of control, administrative or 
executive departments ; and pedagogy should be content 
to let these other departments handle their own problems 
so long as tfiey do so in such a way as to improve the net 



202 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

results of the instructional branch and enable it to turn 
out better citizen material. 

More and more every branch of a modern business 
tends to sharp cleavage into departments and bureaus 
and to specialization. Clerks are given certain branches 
of work, and expected to stick to those and not to meddle 
with any others. In large afifairs it is better — ^nay, es- 
sential — that experts should be put over the many differ- 
ent departments. Otherwise there would be no system 
and no real progress. This has been carried to an ex- 
treme in one of our most successful trusts, wherein the 
various branches of business have been organized, not 
into departments, but into separate and important cor- 
porations, now aggregating more than 100 in number. 
Not only are the 678 retail stores of one branch of 
this business conducted under one corporation, but this 
latter hires its stores from another subsidiary company 
which does nothing but secure and handle leases upon 
desirable locations, and conduct a real estate business 
in that connection. 

The affairs of the colleges are now so large and ex- 
tended that they must draw a sharp distinction between 
their departments, and even between the different bu- 
reaus in these departments; just as already they do be- 
tween the different courses in their curriculum. They 
must let the experts of the financial, pedagogical, ad- 
ministrative, executive and student life departments 
handle the affairs of their respective departments, and 
hold them responsible for the results therein; just as they 
now differentiate between the Greek and the Latin 
courses, or among the various sciences, which were 



Nature of Administrative Departments 203 

formerly taught by the same man. This distinct defi- 
nition of duties and powers, and this placing of responsi- 
bility in connection therewith, are cardinal principles in 
good business practice, and must be so in the colleges. 
The very fact that it has not been so shows the need of 
reorganization. 

President Eliot, in his "University Administration," 
p. 82, says: 

"The faculty of arts and sciences in a broadly developed 
university will necessarily be large, and its individual mem- 
bers will probably have a thorough knowledge of only one 
or two out of the numerous departments of instruction with- 
in the faculty. The mathematicians may often have little 
sympathy with, or knowledge of, the language departments, 
and will be closely affiliated only with the departments of 
physics, chemistry, mechanics, and astronomy. The pro- 
fessors of history will probably know little, and perhaps 
care little, about the scientific departments; but will maintain 
rather close relations with the departments of government 
and economics. Distinguished men and admirable teach- 
ers in such a faculty may easily know nothing to speak of 
about more than half of the subjects of instruction dealt 
with by their faculty." 

Certainly if the various members of the college fac- 
ulty "have little sympathy with or knowledge of" the 
problems of their fellow-instructors, far less can they 
sympathize with, or have knowledge of, or be fitted by 
sympathy or knowledge to solve the intricate adminis- 
trative problems of the huge college factory which now 
embraces from 1,000 to 5,000 members, and of which 
President Eliot says: 

"The American universities have grown in a casual, ag- 
glutinating way, without any definite plan or framework 
to tie together the different departments which were success- 



204 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

ively created. They have ordinarily started with the some- 
what definite organization called a college, and around this 
college have grown up an undergraduate department of ap- 
plied science, including agriculture and engineering, and so- 
called professional schools of law, medicine, dentistry, phar- 
macy, finance or commerce, and, in a few cases, divinity. 
The standard of admission to the professional schools has 
usually been much lower than the standard of admission to 
the college; and indeed in many universities there have been 
no requirements at all for admission to the professional 
schools; so that anybody could enter them, with or without 
any preparatory education. Their students were therefore 
very heterogeneous in quality, and were, as a rule, looked 
down upon by the college students who were candidates 
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Now a group of de- 
tached, unrelated schools is not a university; and it is for 
the trustees of the larger American institutions of the higher 
education to convert these groups of schools into true uni- 
versities." * 

But this change in external scope has been accom- 
panied by an equally far-reaching change in internal 
methods, for President Eliot says further: 

"The rapidity and completeness with which methods of 
instruction and fields of instruction change from generation 
to generation, and even from decade to decade, is one of the 
most astonishing facts in the history of education. Thus 
there is not a single subject within the whole range of in- 
struction at Harvard University, from the beginning of the 
undergraduate course to the end of the professional courses, 
which is now taught in the same way in which it was taught 
forty years ago, or which offers the same field of instruction 
which it offered to the student of the last generation. All 
the methods and apparatus of teaching, and the spirit or 
temper of teacher and taught alike, have changed. Some 
of these profound changes begin in the faculties; but others 
begin outside the university in the working world, and must 
be discerned, appreciated, and adopted by the faculties; 

» "University Administration," p. 39. 



Nature of Administrative Departments 205 

some are university inventions; but many are the conse- 
quences of social, industrial, and political changes in the 
outside world. Every faculty, therefore, has to keep up 
with the rapid march of educational events, and for this 
purpose it must have frequent stated meetings, and patient 
discussion of new proposals." ' 

Any trained business man must perceive that the 
problems which have arisen from such changes in our 
850 competing colleges and universities are strictly ad- 
ministrative in their nature, although relating to college 
pedagogy; and are not, in any sense, pedagogical prob- 
lems of an administrative nature. In our further dis- 
cussions we shall see how terrible have been the losses 
and wastes — especially in valuable citizen material — 
from our failure to perceive the fundamental difference 
in content and treatment between a solving by adminis- 
tration of questions of a pedagogical nature and the at- 
tempt to solve administrative questions by pedagogical 
methods which have not even been able to solve their 
own pedagogical questions. 

From their very nature, administrative and executive 
departments are an added expense without direct pro- 
ducing power. That is, they are directory and super- 
visory rather than productive, using this word in its 
narrow sense. Yet they are constantly multiplied and 
extended at increasing cost in every well-conducted bus- 
iness. This is one of the penalties we pay for modern 
machinery and skilled labor. The president of a rail- 
road company does no practical work in any of the pro- 
ductive departments. His duties are purely executive. 
The same is true of substantially all the high-priced men 

'"University Administration," p. 119. 



2o6 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

connected with the corporation. They belong to the ad- 
ministrative or executive branches of the business, not 
adding directly to the income, but rather reducing it. 
That is, they are an additional expense, to the end that 
the net profits may be larger because of the greater 
safety, system and science with which the business is 
conducted. They have become necessary merely be- 
cause the increased numbers of those engaged in the 
common pursuit, the great field to be covered, the com- 
petition of well-organized rivals, and the use and care of 
modern and intricate machinery demand constantly im- 
proving administrative and executive systems. 

When the railroad consisted of a short single track, on 
which a single mixed passenger and freight train ran 
first in one direction and then in the other, two or three 
men could fill every position in the operating, adminis- 
trative and executive departments. The separation and 
multiplication of these departments and their various 
bureaus are chiefly the results of the growth of the busi- 
ness. Every foreman and superintendent is in one sense 
an administrative officer, or an additional expense for 
the purpose of getting better or even good work out of 
those who actually produce, although, for bookkeeping 
purposes, his wages may be charged with other labor in 
the operating expenses. 

The rule with railroad contractors is about one fore- 
man to each gang of twelve laborers, and a similar rule 
as to the proportion of foremen or superintendents, with 
variance only as to the number supervised, runs through 
the employment of labor in all fields. In most large 
manufacturing concerns the cost of the administrative 



Nature of Administrative Departments 207 

and executive forces, that is, those who do not directly 
produce, is upward of ten per cent of the total outgo, in- 
cluding raw material. 

As a matter of fact, the preceptorial system at Prince- 
ton is quite as much an administrative as a pedagogical 
advance. It is an attempt to insure that the good work 
of the higher professors shall not be wasted upon an un- 
prepared and unappreciative mass of students. The 
preceptors are the college foremen insuring good results 
in their own limited divisions. 

In addition to the executive, the usual strictly admin- 
istrative agencies of an ordinary manufacturing business 
may be divided into those which are in their nature (a) 
creative, (b) directive, (c) corrective, (d) recording, (e) 
investigating, and (/) those which create trade not prod- 
ucts. These same administrative functions in modified 
forms are applicable in our colleges, and should be dif- 
ferentiated and put in force therein. 

(a) The creative agencies are those which prepare and 
lay out work for the operating or producing forces; for 
example, those which design, plan or draft the particular 
form or content of the thing to be produced, so that it 
may accomplish the end in view or satisfy the demands 
of the customer or trade. 

(b) The directive forces are those which superintend 
the actual turning out of the product or manufactured 
articles; for example, the superintendent, the master 
mechanic or master car builder, and so on down through 
all those who supervise but do not themselves perform 
labor. In the earlier days of small things the master 
labored beside his journeymen or apprentices, doing the 



2o8 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

finest work himself; but to-day we find foremen and as- 
sistant foremen ; and over these, superintendents and as- 
sistants; and above these, managers and their deputies; 
and so on up through the various administrative and ex- 
ecutive forces to the president. 

(c) The corrective agencies are those which fix stand- 
ards of good work or good results for the other depart- 
ments and then enforce compliance with these standards; 
as, for instance, the inspectors, the credit and auditing 
bureaus, etc. 

(d) The recording forces are the bookkeepers and 
others who keep the records of the establishment, its 
credits and debits, its purchases, sales, etc. 

(e) The investigators are those who, in the light of 
past experience, are looking for new and improved 
methods, machinery, products and outlets, that there 
may not be stagnation, but rather increased growth, 
power and output to meet the constantly changing con- 
ditions of the plant itself and of its customers and com- 
petitors. Such also is the dead work in a mine, to dis- 
cover and develop in advance new workings which shall 
be ready to continue the output when the older parts of 
the mine are worked out. But this dead work and in- 
vestigation are carried on out of the current receipts of 
the producing portion of the concern and so are an 
added expense, and to that extent reduce current divi- 
dends. 

(/) Those which get trade to keep the producing part 
of the plant in operation. Such are the advertising and 
the salesmen with their traveling and other expenses. 

Substantially all of these administrative bureaus exist 



Nature of Administrative Departments 209 

in any extensive producing business. As it grows, these 
divisions are further developed, differentiated and sys- 
tematized, until at last they become almost or quite 
separate businesses by themselves — yet are all a finan- 
cial necessity, but a financial drag upon the forces which 
actually and manually turn out the material produced 
by the concern, and which are the chief forces in every 
small or primitive business. Their nature is the same 
in the main, and the rules which govern them are simi- 
lar, whatever may be the business or calling in which 
they are to apply. The administrative experts may 
even be the veriest tyros in the technical parts of the 
work, since the necessary technical knowledge can be 
supplied by the practical workers and experts. 

How completely general administration is an expense 
and not a producing agency is illustrated by a statement 
of the heads under which it is carried. In the books of 
one large trust, separate accounts of administration and 
executive expenses are kept under the following head- 
ings: 

President Bureau of Statistics Construction and Main- 
Vice President Bureau of Tests tenance 
Treasurer General Office Transportation 
Secretary Law Woodlands 
General Manager Purchasing Insurance and Taxes 
Auditing Manufacturing Exports 
Accounting Sales 

In other words, there are nineteen separate adminis- 
trative or executive departments or bureaus superim- 
posed upon the productive forces, and necessary to get 
good results out of the producers of the business. As 
the college is distinctively a factory, it requires some- 



2IO The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

thing of this same separate executive and administra- 
tive organization to get satisfactory results out of the 
xdiw material which is turned over to the care of the in- 
structors, who are the college workers and producers. 

But as these administrative departments have grown 
in size, the objects which they originally had in view 
"have increased in scope, importance and results, to cor- 
respond with the added cost. The wise business man 
does not hesitate to increase his administrative ex- 
penses if thereby he can improve other conditions. 

In the colleges the general subject may be pedagogi- 
cal, but the administrative system, to be successful and 
complete, must be essentially like and modeled after 
those applied in ordinary industries and callings, and be 
run upon the same general principles. It is a question 
of numbers, and size, and intricacy, and not of peda- 
gogy. This and the need of a separate administrative 
department are well illustrated by the Briggs Report, 
wherein the committee of the faculty of Harvard College 
upon improving instruction therein frankly confessed 
themselves unable to cope successfully even with the ad- 
ministrative problems directly connected with the peda- 
gogy of the college. The whole investigation was a 
brave attempt upon the part of the faculty to do another's 
work. The very words with which they open their re- 
port should have convinced them that their investigation 
was extrapedagogical : 

"Early in the deliberations of the committee it became 
clear that neither the faculty nor any member of the faculty 
possessed accurate and detailed knowledge of the methods 
and the efficiency of instruction in all the different courses, 



Nature of Administrative Departments 211 

and that the committee, if it would speak intelligently, must 
get such knowledge." 

And so this committee labored for two years in 
gathering and collating the information and statistics 
which the administrative department of a modern fac- 
tory would have had in its records in a much more satis- 
factory form, and which it could supply to the president 
upon a few days' notice, and by the use of the ordinary 
clerical force, and covering a series of years. The in- 
formation thus obtained applied to only one institution 
during a single year, and hence was valueless for another 
institution, or for Harvard a few years later. It was not, 
as in the case of a business office, on tap, kept up to date, 
constantly growing broader and broader, and made 
more available every year for the use of every one con- 
nected with the establishment. The Briggs investiga- 
tion was indeed a fearless investigation along college 
methods. But from the point of modern administrative 
methods it was crude and unscientific and ought to have 
been unnecessary. It was as far behind business prac 
tice as it was ahead of college practice. 

As our college finances are conducted by financial, not 
pedagogical, experts, and our pedagogical department 
by masters of pedagogy, so our college administration 
should be run by administrative, and not pedagogical, 
experts. Hence in our college reorganization we shall 
differentiate as sharply between pedagogy, pure and 
simple, and administration and the executive, as we 
now do between finances and the pedagogy which is 
clogged and fettered by unnecessary and misunderstood 
administrative problems based on high-school and col- 



212 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

onial college conditions. A few samples will show how 
marked is this sharp distinction and cleavage between 
the administrative and all other departments in modern 
business affairs of importance. 

In a mercantile house the rights and duties of the 
salesman and the credit man are clearly distinguished. 
No matter what orders for goods may be obtained, they 
must be approved by the credit man. 

In a factory the cost department is apart from and 
regulates the manufacturing, and determines what profit 
is made upon each product, and charges to each its pro- 
portion of the fixed and other general expenses. 

In an insurance company, the agents may bring in 
business and the medical department may approve the 
risks, but the actuary must determine the basis and plan 
on which the company can safely write its policies and 
accumulate its reserve. 

Thus, in every modern business or industry of impor- 
tance, there are dominant administrative departments 
which do not produce business, but regulate it and make 
it safe and profitable in the end; which do not^ them- 
selves directly increase the assets of the concern, and 
whose cost is each year written off to profit and loss. 
Yet this cost is justified by the improved net results of 
the whole establishment. 

So in the reorganized college the administration will 
nq,t be productive like the finances and pedagogy, but 
regulative like the credit man, the cost accountant, the 
actuary and the other administrative departments — un- 
der whatever name or form — which in other large affairs 
bring order out of chaos and insure profitable results, 



Nature oj Administrative Departments 213 

while conserving the good name of the whole; but all 
adapted to the conditions of that particular institution, 
and with novel improvements to meet novel exigencies. 

A good administrative department systematizes and 
lightens the labors of everyone connected with it, and 
thus gets better results. In the New York offices of the 
great trusts the clerks are promptly dismissed at five 
o'clock each afternoon with as much regularity as the 
members of a trades union; and at its eighteen-story 
building, No. 26 Broadway, New York City, the Stand- 
ard Oil Company emphasizes this rule by turning off 
its electric lights at 5 p.m. and stopping all elevator ser- 
vice at 6 P.M. After these hours everyone must use gas 
and tramp up and down stairs. Much unnecessary la- 
bor and waste of time of all connected with the college 
could be done away with by introducing some much- 
needed reforms through a separate administrative de- 
partment. Much of the college work could be done in 
one half the time now required if the colleges could in- 
troduce some of the system which their undergraduates 
will find pervading every department of life as soon as 
they leave Alma Mater's doors. 

We must now further examine in detail some of the 
ordinary administrative bureaus, to ascertain if they 
cannot and must not be adapted to college conditions 
and used to improve college methods and results, if our 
reorganization is to be on anything like as high a plaqe 
as prevails in our modern corporations. 

Possibly we shall approach this examination more 
open-mindedly if we know that there is one well-authen- 
ticated case (and undoubtedly many more) where busi- 



214 ^^^ Reorganization of Our Colleges 

ness methods have been deliberately introduced into the 
college under the direction of a trained business admin- 
istrative expert, and that the pedagogical effects thereof 
have been eminently satisfactory. The following is an 
extract from a letter of the Secretary of Columbia 
University : 

"As a result of one year's vigorous business administra- 
tion of the dean's office in the Schools of Mines, Engineering 
and Chemistry of Columbia University, the number of 
course conditions per student was reduced forty-three per 
cent, the number of entrance conditions carried by students 
being reduced sixty-two per cent in the same time. Put in 
another way, the ratio of conditions carried by first, second 
and third year men last year, to those carried by second, 
third, and fourth year men, this year (i. e., the same students 
one year later) was seven to one." 



CHAPTER XVII 

BOOKKEEPING AND ACCOUNTING IN THE REORGANIZED 
COLLEGE 

We cannot understand modern business administra- 
tion unless we see how, from comparatively simple be- 
ginnings, it has developed and built up intricate and 
indispensable bureaus and systems with wide uses and 
beneficent results. This is well illustrated by the 
growth of the science of modern accounting. 

Until comparatively recent years bookkeeping was 
merely the most elementary form of preserving a record 
of the simplest financial dealings, that is, of the debits 
and credits. A crude single-entry ledger and daybook 
sufficed for most concerns. But as the transactions in- 
creased in variety, complexity and amount, bookkeeping 
errors also increased and required some check ; and ac- 
cordingly the double-entry system with its trial balance 
was introduced, with the sole object, at first, of detecting 
errors in entering and posting. As late as thirty years 
ago this new system was often strenuously opposed as 
not yielding results which could pay for the additional 
time, expense and skill which it required. 

But soon modern exigencies began to demand, not 
merely accuracy in entering and posting, or knowledge 
of how much the concern owed or was owed, and to and 
from whom, but rather what it was doing in its own 

215 



2i6 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

various branches and how much it was making or losing 
in each. In other words, the main thing became, not 
its debit and credit relation to others, but what the busi- 
ness itself was costing and earning in each department 
and item. That is, the prime object grew to be an an- 
alysis, to the finest detail, of the business itself and of its 
own shortcomings and successes. 

In this emergency it was found that the new-fangled 
and much-opposed double-entry bookkeeping furnished 
an instrument, ready to hand, which could be easily de- 
veloped to meet the additional and changed require- 
ments. Thus this method, which was devised merely 
as a check upon the accuracy of the bookkeeper's work, 
has become the foundation of a most intricate and deli- 
cate internal analysis and system, comprehending book- 
keeping, auditing, cost-accounting, and the collection of 
statistics which serve both as a diagnosis and prognosis 
of the business. Without it, and the improvements 
which have grown out of it, true success in the tangle of 
modern business conditions would be impossible and 
bankruptcy would be inevitable; for modern auditing 
and accounting in all their forms are directly based upon 
double-entry bookkeeping. But, again, all this implies 
additional administrative detail and expense. 

Our colleges have not gotten beyond the single-entry 
stage, nor can we expect them to rise to anything in ad- 
ministrative methods corresponding to modern account- 
ing and auditing, so long as they imagine that they can 
meet the intricacies of their modern problems by cling- 
ing to colonial and pedagogical single-entry methods. 

I am not now speaking of the college financial de- 



Bookkeeping and Accounting 217 

partment, because, as already shown, its bookkeeping 
and accounting problems are so simple that there is 
really no excuse for their not being kept in a perfectly 
satisfactory form. I am referring rather to the failure 
of the colleges to develop any truly scientific and com- 
prehensive system for finding out the facts, and for an- 
ticipating and meeting the problems which have been 
arising daily in connection with the expansion of the 
college, and its adoption of university methods if not 
of university form, and the other fundamental changes 
which we have had occasion to discuss herein, and which 
were so clearly indicated in the extracts from President 
Eliot's latest book, given on pages 203 and 204. One 
man who is almost more closely related than anyone 
else to college affairs, and especially to religious educa- 
tion, puts it in this way : 

" It seems to be the impression that as soon as you get into 
the atmosphere of college education, and especially of edu- 
cation under the auspices of religion, you have no right to 
look for facts." 

This is a pretty broad statement, but it comes from 
one who has had the very best opportunities to judge of 
conditions. Possibly the nature of the rather technical 
change in the business bookkeeping system, and the 
difference between business and college ideals, can be 
made clearer in another way. Under the crude single- 
entry system the proprietor's only unit was the external 
debits and credits of the business, expressed in dollars 
and cents, and this was quite sufficient for a small busi- 
ness conducted under simple and primitive conditions. 
But as the business expanded, it became necessary, in 



21 8 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

order to accomplish the same results, to provide new 
units by which to measure results and meet competition 
— units of time and men and machines, of profit and 
loss in each department, of detailed expenses and costs, 
and all the other units which make up the objects and 
ends of a modern accounting and auditing system. But 
our colleges are too much inclined to stick to the most 
paltry feature of their original unit of value and ac- 
counting. They are content to magnify the marking 
system as a substitute for the former intimate personal 
knowledge of the teacher and taught, brought about by 
daily contact for four years in a very small college. They 
forget that a student was not told of his marks unless he 
made special inquiry after graduation, and that marks 
were kept merely to determine rank and honors upon 
the commencement stage.' 

We must find new units of value in our reorganized 
colleges; units based upon a broad training for citizen- 
ship; units calculated to supply the lack of the intimate 
acquaintance with the pupil's personal characteristics 
and educational needs which gave the earlier professor 
such an ability to train each individual student as he 
needed to be trained. Huge numbers of students and 
teachers, and changed social and other conditions make 
impossible the former close personal acquaintance of all 
within the college walls. The same results must now be 
obtained in other ways and through new units, as in 
business ; and these new units of value, and the methods 
of properly applying them, must be one of the functions 
of a bureau of the new administrative department; and, 

1 "Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 57, 186. 



Bookkeeping and Accounting 219 

so far as possible, each new unit must have a like value 
in every institution. 

We must have an administrative system broad enough 
to cover all of the diversities of our colleges, and yet cap- 
able of being applied to the ordinary problems of any 
particular institution. This diversity has an important 
bearing on this present phase of our subject, because it 
emphasizes the great differences which exist in the pro- 
fessed or actual aims of our various educators and in- 
stitutions, and of their systems of study and training; 
which differences are enfeebling and disturbing in the 
highest degree, and must continue to be so until some 
modern form of accounting and auditing, applicable to 
college conditions, introduces some uniformity and new 
units of value into their records and methods. We must 
agree as to the objects for which we are to work after 
our reorganization, or else that reorganization will be in- 
complete because not directed to any well-defined goal 
agreed upon by institutions of the same class and with 
similar aims. This can be accomplished only by devis- 
ing and extensively applying something like a modern 
double-entry auditing and accounting system to the ped- 
agogical, that is, to the producing part of our colleges. 
The evident differences between what the college does 
stand for and what it should stand for indicates to the 
unprejudiced observer from without that there are not 
sufficient common data, and hence no common point 
from which to argue. These must be obtained through 
bureaus of the administrative departments of many col- 
leges working together upon an agreed system. 

This may seem technical to many readers, but it will 



220 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

appeal to business men, public accountants, corporation 
lawyers and reorganizers; and a very little and first-hand 
investigation will convince them that the charges are 
well founded, and that the colleges are still in their 
single-entry stage in administration. They still have, 
too often, a crude system for keeping the debits and 
credits which entitle a man to a sixty or seventy per 
cent diploma, but they have no way of analyzing, day 
by day or even term by term, the real results, in the 
pedagogical and student life departments, of each 
branch and subdivision of the college work. 

As a matter of fact, a college education consists of the 
final molding which the student citizen gets in each of 
the three planes of his college life. The college book- 
keeping system is largely based upon the idea that that 
education consists of getting a diploma — ^by hook or by 
crook. When a college education means to us in name 
what it does in fact to the individual, we shall see that 
the college must have some way of internal analyzation 
such as every good business concern possesses and uses. 
We will understand, as we proceed, how indispensable 
this analysis has become in modern business and manu- 
facturing, and how invaluable and indispensable it will 
seem to all concerned after it shall have had a fair trial 
in the college. 

One of our largest universities, for example, has not 
been able to put into practice a modem method of de- 
termining even the exact financial cost of its several de- 
partments. These hand in estimates upon which the 
annual budget is based. But at the end of the year the 
surpluses and deficits of the several departments are 



Bookkeeping and Accounting 221 

arranged by trading postage stamps and supplies. There 
is no question of dishonesty involved, but the institu- 
tion's bookkeeping must be essentially misleading and 
valueless. 

If this be true of so simple a matter as its cash account, 
it is not surprising to learn that a recent careful exami- 
nation of its pedagogical account disclosed many courses 
in the catalogue which had not been taken by a single 
student for some years. If the institution can afford it, 
it may be quite necessary that there shall be many grad- 
uate courses which are taken by but few students. The 
point here is that the college auditing department should 
be able to know and show the relative value, instruc- 
tionally, of every part of its working force and machin- 
ery, and that, until this is as thoroughly so in the college 
as the great business trust, the college is at a marked dis- 
advantage in determining how it can most wisely apply 
its financial, pedagogical and other resources in meeting 
its obligations as a public servant. 

After a pretty careful examination of college methods, 
and from a practical knowledge of the growth of ac- 
counting and business administration for thirty years, I 
am sure that, if our colleges would formulate and apply 
new units of value and up-to-date administrative and 
accounting methods, they would quadruple in ten years 
their net results in wholesome training for citizenship, 
without a dollar's increase in endowment, and to the 
lasting satisfaction and gain of all concerned, and at a 
relatively great saving in cost. 

Certainly an educational institution, with millions of 
capital, ought to have as modern an accounting system 



222 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

of time, money, material, men and net results, as thou- 
sands of corporations with one hundredth of its capital. 
The whole college economy would be upset if the presi- 
dent should call for a tithe of the detailed information 
which the auditing and accounting bureaus of a great 
trust furnish daily as a matter of course. But this 
would be just as true of the trust if its workmen were 
asked for this information. It is the latters' duty to 
work and produce, and let the administrative depart- 
ment gather its information and facts by its own methods. 
So in our reorganized college it will be a bureau of its 
new administrative department which will do the ac- 
counting work, and the instructors will give their time 
to teaching and to improving their own departments. 
Some of the marked and epoch-making improvements, 
which will follow from the adoption in our reorganized 
colleges of something approximating to modern ac- 
counting, will become apparent as we proceed. 



CHAPTER XVin 

THE USE OF BLANK FORMS IN THE REORGANIZED 
COLLEGE 

The only great profession or business in our country, 
dealing with large numbers of men and having wide 
competition, which has failed to elaborate and adopt a 
comprehensive set of blank forms, is the college — which, 
nevertheless, is presumed to be intelligently training our 
future problem solvers and citizens. This failure is em- 
phasized because it indicates how litde college pedagogy 
understands or, under its present administrative ideals, 
can understand its own internal problems or the modern 
methods and tools available to help it in solving those 
problems; and hence how little probability there is that, 
of its own initiative, it can hope to work out of its diffi- 
culties, or to fit its students to intelligently use forms and 
blanks in their own future work. Yet the use of forms, 
blanks and precedents is an important educational fea- 
ture which must be learned at some future time in the 
students' training. 

Definite forms or blanks serve several vital uses in 
modern business and affairs: 

(i) To obtain and preserve exactness and the best 
precedents, and thus to save time, money and mental 
wear, as in law forms, insurance policies, etc. 

(2) To systematize details, increase administrative 
223 



224 ^^^ Reorganization of Our Colleges 

effectiveness and decrease administrative expense, and 
thus, incidentally, to make it possible for experts in any 
line to take up their work in any place; as, for example, 
bookkeeping and auditing systems. Forms and blanks 
also exactly define the work to be done and the method 
of doing it, and promote honesty in handling the time 
and property of other people. 

(3) To analyze intricate affairs so as to enable us (a) 
to study them in their slightest detail ; (b) to know every 
day what a vast establishment is doing; (c) to contrast 
easily and surely present conditions with those of the 
past; (d) to detect errors before they have become serious 
or chronic; (e) to know precisely what each department 
or product costs, and where a profit or loss is being made; 
and hence (/) to collect statistics which will furnish us a 
compass by which to steer our future course. Such 
modern analyzations are seen in cost systems, railroad 
accounting methods, etc. Let us examine these three 
classes more carefully and in detail. 

(i) The earliest instances of forms as precedents are 
found in the law. The ancient writs and forms date 
back many centuries and serve as examples of the con- 
scientious endeavor of the law, first, to exactly define and 
then to preserve our legal rights and remedies. No law- 
yer can imagine what would be the present legal uncer- 
tainty if the best minds upon the bench and at the bar 
and in the legislature had not been constantly exercised 
to prepare, preserve and improve legal forms and prec- 
edents, or if each state's attorney or court clerk or other 
public official was not bound down, yet immensely 
helped, by rigid forms and precedents. What would 



The Use oj Blank Forms 225 

courts of law do if, instead of using and passing upon 
the standardized and recognized forms and precedents 
in common use, they were constantly called upon to 
construe and sign higgledy-piggledy forms to be devised 
upon each occasion by each lawyer ? Or what would a 
life insurance expert say if each agent, skilled or un- 
skilled, might send in an application in a form to be 
evolved in each case, and if each medical examiner 
wrote out his own varying medical report, and if the 
clerks in the home office drew each new policy in the 
form which occurred to them at the moment? If, for 
example, there were no recognized forms and standards 
of insurance policies, it would be necessary to have the 
writing of these intricate contracts done under the 
charge of a skilled lawyer, instead of having the written 
blanks filled in by an intelligent clerk. Yet after 270 
years of college development in this country, such is 
about the stage at which we have arrived as to forms 
and precedents — with the exception that, in intercol- 
legiate athletics, our alumni athletic committees have 
worked out a rigid set of precedents and rules in football 
and other sports; and that, in their baseball and other 
score cards and records, the students may measure their 
performances by standards which put upon each play a 
value recognized throughout the country, and make a 
college record as good in California as in New England! 

This is merely an application, by expert business ad- 
ministrators, of business principles to what many deem 
the lowest plane of the college life. Its undue promi- 
nence is almost wholly due to the fact that it is the only 
department where business principles, upon essentially 



226 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

the same system and in essentially the same detail, have 
been applied at the same time in practically every college 
in the country. This overwhelming success of business 
administration, in the only department of the college 
where it has been cooperatively, wisely and systemati- 
cally standardized and applied, ought to make the col- 
lege authorities pause — or, as their students would say, 
sit up and take notice. The phrase fits the case ex- 
actly. If strict business administrative methods, cooper- 
atively applied by outside experts, have upset the college 
economy and unduly exalted intercollegiate athletics at 
the expense of the pedagogical department, the college 
equilibrium can be restored only when it puts the same 
successful business methods, under competent experts, 
into force in all parts of the college. 

The same rules as to waste, loss of time and want of 
exactness apply in the college as in any other great ag- 
gregation of men and material resources working toward 
a common end. The college must realize this, and 
elaborate and use this great agency of forms and prec- 
edents, or else it must continue to waste its own time, 
money and efficiency, and those of its teachers, officers 
and students. 

(2) The reorganized college administration will thor- 
oughly appreciate that standardized and scientific meth- 
ods and precedents are not clogs and frills which ob- 
struct, but rather scientific working tools which increase 
administrative and executive, and hence productive, ef- 
fectiveness, and decrease the friction, expense and loss 
of time which are otherwise inevitable in large affairs; 
and that they tend to educate a corps of trained admin- 



The Use of Blank Forms 227 

istrative experts available, like trained pedagogues, for in- 
stant use in any institution. But to-day, after 270 years 
of experience or lack of experience, there are no such 
comprehensive and standardized college administrative 
systems, like the bookkeeping, accounting and auditing 
systems of the business world, and no administrative ex- 
perts fitted to advise, introduce or conduct such systems 
in colleges. Our institutions, for many years, must seek 
help and guidance in this respect from the experts of the 
outside world. The colleges must bend their united 
energies until their administration and executive are not 
one whit behind their machinery — that is, their peda- 
gogy — ^but up to date, so that their chief in command 
can rely upon the information furnished him, as both 
complete and accurate; and, also, so that honest and 
efficient work may be done in all parts of the college. 

(3) This is not the time or place to tell what modern 
cost and accounting systems have done for our business 
concerns, nor to set forth the place which they have oc- 
cupied in modern reorganizations. A very few exam- 
ples will serve to show what these great instruments 
might do in a properly reorganized college. 

The accounting system of a railroad must audit and 
safeguard the company's cash and interests in the hands 
of thousands of agents and employees scattered, often 
singly, over an immense area. Yet it must also be able 
to tell what each link and branch of the road is doing; to 
analyze each detail, and charge it with its proper pro- 
portion of the general expenses, and define its particular 
profit or loss; to provide a means of comparing each de- 
tail with the past, and with similar details upon other 



228 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

roads; and, by mere transcription of the totals of its 
several accounts, furnish the precise data for the various 
reports which each company must make to state offi- 
cials or the United States Interstate Commerce Commis- 
sion. Yet these uses of their accounting systems long 
since came to be regarded by the railroads as profitable 
and comparatively simple. 

But when railroad scandals, misdeeds and rebates 
called for a drastic and far-reaching remedy, it was 
found in an accounting system embodied in printed 
blanks ; and a college professor was appointed to devise 
a set of rigid yet comprehensive reports to be furnished 
by each interstate railroad. These reports, calling for 
minutely detailed information under many headings, 
are to be the means through which the general govern- 
ment expects to prevent a recurrence of the evils com- 
plained of in the past. Furthermore, in their latest form, 
these reports are so designed as to enable investors and 
the public to know just what the railroads are earning, 
and hence what is the true and relative value of their 
securities, judged by an intelligible standard which ap- 
plies alike to every railroad doing an interstate business. 
Thus, through the employment, universally, of such a 
mere administrative detail as a uniform accounting sys- 
tem, the government proposes to protect not only itself 
and the public who use the railroads, but also those who 
deal with or own the most extensive form of investment 
securities in our country. 

Our railroads, while obeying the mandates of this law, 
will actually be benefited financially and otherwise by 
this wonderful advance in administrative methods, for 



The Use of Blank Forms 229 

the new system will force itself into every department of 
their organization and enforce better work therein, and 
thus improve the morale and consequent financial re- 
sults of every part and of the whole. In the past our 
railroads have often complained of and resisted the in- 
creasing expense entailed upon them by the more de- 
tailed reports constantly called for by governmental 
commissions; but the great trunk lines could not if they 
would, and would not if they could, go back to their 
administrative conditions of fifteen years ago, nor wipe 
out the splendid advantages which have come to them 
because they have been compelled to arrange their audit- 
ing and accounting departments so as to furnish the ex- 
act details called for by the government. These new 
accounting requirements have compelled them to ana- 
lyze sharply their own business, and compare it in all its 
details with similar details furnished by their compet- 
itors. Here is another illustration of the benefits that 
would flow to the colleges by the enforcement of a sys- 
tem which was practically universal in its use in insti- 
tutions of the same class. 

The same things are true of each successive improve- 
ment in the cost-accounting of a factory. It is not only 
a safeguard and record, but the philosopher, guide and 
friend of the captains of industry who are the executive 
officers of the concern. As a ready reckoner and chart, 
it multiplies the powers and value of the best men of the 
company, while it checks off their work as well. It 
enables them to pass over the minor matters to assist- 
ants, but furnishes exact data on which to decide the 
most momentous questions. At present one great fault 



230 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

of the colleges is that there is no way of checking off the 
production, that is, the professors' work. For many 
instructors have an antiquated idea that it is an insult 
to suggest that they need to have their work checked off. 
A distinguished professor once said: "For the presi- 
dent even to inquire as to the methods of my department 
is to express dissatisfaction. If he were entirely satis- 
fied he would not inquire. To inquire, therefore, is 
simply to offer me an insult." 

It is not difficult to see why there is so much jealousy 
in college in regard to administrative reforms. They 
are not under the charge of a separate and coordinate 
department of administrative experts, but under peda- 
gogical colleagues who are deputed to do some extra 
and much-needed administrative work. It is only hu- 
man nature that any proposed changes should bear 
rather harder on some instructors than on others; and 
hence be resented as the arrogance, interference or un- 
fairness proposed by a fellow-teacher. We must expect 
this feeling to hinder true progress until such time as we 
put the administrators in a separate department of 
their own, and give them real authority commensurate 
with the dignity and importance of their work. 

The attitude of the head of a great business concern is 
just the contrary to that of the college. He is constantly 
striving to put into effect new and improved administra- 
tive methods to check off the work of himself and of 
every other man in the business, that thereby each may 
do better work with less exertion. He will gladly pay a 
premium for any new plan by which he can measure up 
£ind improve his own work. The college financial de- 



The Use oj Blank Forms 231 

partment sometimes provides a method of auditing the 
dollars and cents, but there is no college bureau that can 
furnish an audit of the days and hours of teachers and 
taught which must not be wasted, for the undergradu- 
ates will not pass that way again. 

Many of the alunmi are eventually to become part of 
some great corporate or business system which has been 
made possible by rigid adherence to modern forms, 
blanks and accounting systems, and by the science and 
brains which make use of these as they do of any other 
improved modern machinery. There is nothing novel 
or unusual about such an idea. We are in constant 
touch with such methods. We have to do with a system 
of forms, blanks and accounts whenever we deal with a 
a public-service corporation, or a department store, or a 
great factory, or pay our taxes, or touch the affairs of 
any governmental agency. Why, then, should not the 
student citizens be better fitted for their life's work by 
intelligent contact with such agencies during their college 
course? 

As a matter of fact, then, college pedagogy is the only 
profession, dealing with large numbers of men and in 
active competition with other great institutions of the 
same kind, which has not appreciated the administra- 
tive, formative and scientific value of a modern stand- 
ardized system of forms, blanks, precedents and ac- 
counting. It and its students have paid dearly for its 
ignorance and blindness, but must now learn by ex- 
perience the true value and unlimited uses of these 
agencies. The reorganized college administrative and 
executive departments will make it the first task to revo- 



232 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

lutionize all this. So long as this simple yet extensively 
applicable agency is not comprehensively and intelli- 
gently used by our colleges, and the vi^ork of each and 
all their activities checked off, compared and standard- 
ized, we must expect to continue to get only the thirty 
per cent of possible results in training for citizenship 
which the colleges have so often given us. They will 
still continue to exhibit their lack of understanding of 
their own true aims and purposes, their incompetence 
to analyze their subjects, their lack of uniformity and 
comprehension in their treatment of their problems, 
their use of their best minds to do clerical work, and 
their inability to avoid future mistakes through studying 
and charting their earlier ones. 

The various places where proper and standardized 
blanks, forms and precedents, and accounting systems 
based thereon, will improve college results, will appear as 
we proceed, and not least in connection with the mark- 
ing system. Most forms can and should be constantly 
improved as often as experience and new conditions 
require changes. Hence the reorganized colleges must 
not be satisfied with what will seem sufficient in an 
earlier stage of their development, but must constantly 
look for and make improvements. They must print 
their forms and blanks in small editions to enable them 
to change them as frequently as they can profitably do 
so. Yet one dean writes: 

"Colleges are afraid of expense and will not print forms 
even at the request of a dean, for fear that they may not be 
used enough to pay or may be superseded next year by some- 
thing better!" 



The Use oj Blank Forms 233 

Good business practice is quite the opposite to this, and 
changes and improvements are constantly made in each 
new edition of blanks. 

Nor must the colleges make a fetish out of any system 
of forms. At best it is only a means to an end, and they 
must not overelaborate it nor let it become their master 
to be slavishly followed. Moreover, a simple system, 
closely and wisely used, is far better than an elaborate 
one which is used in a perfunctory or slovenly manner. 
Above all, they must avoid degeneration into red tape or 
the use of any unnecessary detail whose advantage is not 
clearly seen. The elaborate reports of the railroads to 
the Interstate Commerce Commission would not be 
tolerated if the object of every detail was not clearly 
evident. Indeed, these forms have been prepared with 
the active cooperation of the accounting departments of 
the railroads with the Commission's experts. In other 
words, the colleges must remember that there are forms 
and forms, and that forms and blanks are in the nature 
of administrative expense saddled upon the producing 
forces, and therefore to be used as sparingly as possible. 
An institution should not take pride in a system of forms 
because it is elaborate, but rather in a system in which 
every form is indispensable because it is directed to some 
comprehensive and important end, or to furnish new 
units of value by means of which to demonstrate what 
every part of the work is doing, and thus to add to the 
efficiency of the whole in training for ennobling and 
efficient citizenship. 

An instructor writes: 

"It might be observed that most college professors detest 



234 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

blanks, and that it is exceedingly difficult to get them to 
make good use of those they now have." 

This is partly because the present forms are of little 
value and lead nowhere, and partly because there is no 
coordinate and independent department in charge of the 
system. 



CHAPTER XIX 

STUDY AND CARE OF ITS PLANT BY THE REORGANIZED 
COLLEGE — THE COLLEGE INVENTORY 

The new administrative department will have the 
brains, experience and desire to make a full inventory 
and analysis of its plant, animate and inanimate, and of 
its capabilities, to the end that thereafter full value and 
results shall constantly be gotten out of the plant and 
each and every part thereof. 

An example from a modern reorganization will illus- 
trate how these things are not done in the colleges. Upon 
its incorporation, a certain trust took over about thirty 
mills of varying sizes and descriptions, situated in many 
different states, but all engaged in some branch of the 
same great industry. One of the first things done was 
to make an exhaustive study of each plant to ascertain 
what it comprised, how it could be simplified and im- 
proved, and then how it could be coordinated into the 
new great working whole. Many processes and much 
costly machinery were found to be duplicated. For ex- 
ample, each mill had disposed of its waste material upon 
its own plan or for its own purposes. This system was 
changed, and all the waste was shipped to one of four 
conveniently located plants especially reequipped to 
get the highest price for this waste at the least cost; and a 
further saving was effected by cutting out corresponding 
departments and processes in the twenty-six other mills. 

235 



236 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Furthermore, the new management found itself the 
owner of thirty mills, none of which could furnish a 
comprehensive inventory upon a given plan. Hence 
there was organized, upon a scientific basis, a new in- 
ventory-taking department, headed by a skilled super- 
intendent, who was given the necessary assistants and 
such local aids as were desirable. At the end of three 
years this department had paid for itself twenty times 
over by the vast amount of machinery, tools and parts 
which it had unearthed, listed, and made salable or 
available in the different mills. But this was one of the 
least important of its good results. It had provided an 
unerring chart for future work and improvements. For 
example, if the company wished to install a new ma- 
chine, costing $100,000, it could set it up in Mill A and 
thereby replace an $80,000 machine, which could be 
profitably put into Mill B. The $60,000 machine there 
displaced could be set up in Mill C, and so on down the 
line until the machine thrown out in Mill K was fit only 
for the scrap heap — and all this by the aid of an inven- 
tory which was merely the scientific and complete record 
of an administrative bureau, yet which would be ac- 
cepted as a matter of course in such a reorganization. 
It is not too much to say that in this single department 
of one trust there was more scientific study of the con- 
cern's plant, and a more complete record and use of what 
was thereby found, than have been made in a decade by 
all of our 850 colleges and universities, with their $300,- 
000,000 of fixed plant and $300,000,000 of funded capital. 

The words of the eminent instructor quoted above, 
"Did you ever know folk who sang so many paeans to 



Study and Care oj the College Plant 237 

themselves?" impress the candid observer of college 
catalogues and other official publications. The insti- 
tutions too often hold up certain ideal conditions as 
substantially realized in their own case, and they finally 
come to believe that these conditions are actually ideal 
and existent. Yet careful inquiry often demonstrates 
that in these very particulars the college is in a very bad 
shape. Recently an old and active alumnus trustee in 
a leading university complained bitterly to me of certain 
vicious tendencies which he claimed were rampant 
therein, although he had been fighting them constantly 
for many years. On the same day I received a letter 
from the president of the same institution expressing 
supreme satisfaction that these very evils had not ex- 
isted and could not exist therein. Both of these men 
are well known and widely honored, but either one or 
the other was not perfectly frank, or else the facts about 
important branches of the institution had not been prop- 
erly studied and made known, so as to furnish a com- 
mon ground for discussing them. It was undoubtedly 
an honest difference, but, from a business standpoint, 
an unnecessary one; and from the standpoint of the 
commonwealth and the undergraduate an unpardonable 
difference which could not have existed if an available 
and accurate annual inventory had revealed the real 
facts. 

The second annual report of the Carnegie Founda- 
tion (p. 37) says: 

"The catalogues of many colleges are prepared in such 
manner as to make it difficult to extract from them exact 
and specific information concerning courses, entrance re- 



238 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

quirements and facilities for work. There runs through 
most of these publications an optimistic view of the facilities 
and excellencies of the institution which goes far toward 
making these publications advertisements rather than sim- 
ple, straightforward accounts of those things which students 
and the, public seek to know." 

A proper inventory shows what goods are shopworn 
or otherwise defective. Furthermore, goods are taken 
at cost and not at their selling or catalogue value. There 
has been too much tendency to take everything in a 
college at its catalogue and not at its true value educa- 
tionally. The college has no data such as a good in- 
ventory gives to the dealer or manufacturer, by which 
it can tell just what it has on its shelves. The nearest 
approach that any college has made to taking a full in- 
ventory was in the case of the Briggs Report, already 
referred to, made to the Harvard faculty in 1904. The 
conditions disclosed were certainly not edifying, but the 
spirit in which the investigation of a small part of the 
college work was made, and the frank and full report 
thereof published, was worthy of the best modern busi- 
ness practice and of being carefully followed by this and 
other institutions. So far as it went it was a splendid 
example of how a college may well take an account of 
stock, but it should be followed up and taken annually, 
not by one college but by many, and the results collated 
and compared. Otherwise one half of the true value 
and power for good of such work is lost. 

But very frequently a college president or professor 
resents it if you mildly suggest that there is nothing in 
our colleges of the nature of a modern high-class ad- 
ministrative department. The administration as an ad- 



Study and Care of the College Plant 239 

junct to the other duties of the instructors, which we see 
in so many colleges, serves only to promote jealousy, 
becloud the issue, delay real reform and hinder peda- 
gogical results. If the head of such a system would 
spend a month going carefully over the details and ideals 
of the administrative bureaus of a great business cor- 
poration, his head would reel, but he would have some 
idea of what true administration means — outside of our 
colleges — and the great purposes, all good and helpful, 
which it serves. It would be better still if our college 
presidents and chief professors would spend their sab- 
batical years in their own country at the heart of a 
modern trust, and there learn how the least as well as 
the greatest things are checked off and accounted for; 
how many units there are besides those of the cash 
debits and credits of the concern; how every detail is 
watched and its record kept; how every department is 
set off against its fellow; how each day tells its tale to 
those that follow, and all march on to the end of the 
fiscal year and the final balance sheet. Then, and not 
till then, will our teaching force have some adequate no- 
tion of how pseudo administration can clog their work, 
and an up-to-date administrative department could 
transform a college and its ideals and net educational 
results, and restore its former high meaning to the term 
"college education." 



CHAPTER XX 

HOW THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE WILL STUDY ITS 
FIELD 

The wise manufacturer or business man studies most 
carefully the field into which he must send his goods ; or 
else he will soon become bankrupt. He must know 
about railroad and water freights, tariff and police regu- 
lations, internal revenue and pure-food rules, local leg- 
islation and habits, and scores of other details before 
determining how many and what manner of goods shall 
be produced. This often necessitates an extensive pri- 
vate bureau of information, supplemented by any fur- 
ther figures which can be gotten from the great govern- 
mental bureaus and commissions, and a "follow-up" 
system, and many other administrative agencies. But 
all this implies that the field constantly changes in some 
particular which must be as constantly watched and 
provided for in the economy of the business. This 
study of the field also requires a continual push into new 
fields, and if necessary the creation of new wants which 
shall be filled by new goods, or the making of new prod- 
ucts to replace more ancient or less efficient or more 
costly forms. 

Much has been written and is being written about the 
change of the college field from the earlier days — when 
its graduates were fitted only for the ministry, law, 

240 



Studying the College Field 241 

medicine or teaching, "ttie learned professions" — to the 
present time when scores of courses can be pursued in 
our colleges and universities and technical, agricul- 
tural and normal schools. But this undoubted change 
calls for a correspondingly widespread and standardized 
study of the field, and its past, present and probable 
changes. 

One of the needed administrative reforms in most col- 
leges is a studying of their respective fields, to insure that 
their scrap-heap education shall fit its victims for some 
field, even if it does not go so far as actually to unfit them 
for any real service in future years; and then, if possible, 
to insure that there is some proper opportunity for each 
graduate. With a growing proportion of our college 
graduates it is no longer a question of square or round 
pegs to fit square or round holes, but of polygonic pegs 
to fit holes of the most intricate design. About fifty per 
cent of our undergraduates finally drift into business. 
What is here said shows how far the college methods 
and ideals of good work are often below those of first- 
class business; and how far, except under the prof essional 
coach, a college course may unfit a young man for his 
life's work, especially in business; and how little these 
four years may contain of real value to the student in 
finding himself and in training for efficient citizenship — 
to offset the corresponding years of growth and indi- 
vidual training which his high-school fellows will have 
gained under the strict schooling of a modern business 
office. We must not lose sight of the dwarfing effects 
upon her undergraduates of Alma Mater's own failure 
to introduce and practice the best administrative meth- 



242 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

ods, including a careful survey of possible fields, and 
the accurate exhibition of these fields before her stu- 
dents, with every possible aid in assisting them to train 
in some one general direction. As a consequence a col- 
lege education is barred out in many establishments as 
an undesirable thing, while it has lost its pristine pre- 
eminence in the eyes of many parents. 

Far as the high-school education of to-day has ad- 
vanced beyond the three R's of the old " writing schools," 
so far also has the demand for well- trained college grad- 
uates advanced beyond the older learned professions of 
ministry, medicine, teaching and law. There is a con- 
stant call for well-trained college men, but many fields 
are overcrowded with incompetents as well as com- 
petents ; and new fields must be incessantly watched for 
as they are being created every year. In business such 
a condition would cause the inmiediate organization 
and scientific equipment of a bureau, not only to study 
the field, but to lay the exact results before the produc- 
ing and selling staff, and profit by their advice which is 
founded on knowledge gained by actual service in the 
factory and the field. One well-known concern, whose 
market is among the farmers, annually gathers its sales- 
men together at its plant near New York, entertaining 
them and their families, and paying for a special train 
from the West. For certain hours each day a conven- 
tion is held at the factory, at which the company's op- 
portunities, capabilities and field are matched up and 
discussed, and during the rest of the time the company's 
guests are handsomely entertained at its expense. Tens 
of thousands of dollars are thus spent annually by one 



Studying the College Field 243 

concern to make a market for a comparatively cheap 
machine. What a sorry contrast to such a study of its 
field do our college factories present with their output of 
the best youth of our land! The college can never ap- 
proximate to doing its full duty to the state until it does 
all in its power, not only to fit men for lives of future use- 
fulness, but also to insure that its graduates find places 
where they can grow until they in turn are fully able to 
do' their entire duty to the state. 

Our colleges may well take a leaf from the experience 
of their business competitors, and insure and take pride 
in the future successes of their alumni, and the reduc- 
tion of their own waste heaps to the smallest possible 
proportions. It is very well to have a theory of educa- 
tion which argues that some particular culture course or 
method must be better than any other; but it is far 
wiser to have an administrative department which shall 
study the college plant and its capabilities, and the 
fields which lie before its graduates, and at least at- 
tempt to whittle down its students approximately to the 
holes into which they are likely to be applied. Such a 
department and such a scientific utilitarianism would 
make our college teaching more rewarding and its re- 
sults more sure, and tend to restore college education 
and the reputation of the various institutions to some- 
thing like their former high level. At least it would 
shut the mouths of most critics who now rightfully find 
fault with college methods and results, and decry a 
"college education." 

Many of our medical courses have been extended to 
four years in addition to an A.B. degree, and as a result 



244 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

our young men may not be able to commence their pro- 
fessional careers before they are twenty-seven or twenty- 
eight years of age. A year or two at this period of life 
is very valuable. No merchant who haggles over a 
commission or discount of one sixteenth or one thirty- 
second of one per cent would think of wasting a year's 
time and salary of his best workmen. Yet while our 
universities properly keep on raising their professional 
requirements, they take no adequate steps to save a 
year or two of the productive lives of their students, by 
insuring that better work is done in earlier educational 
stages, so that a year or two may be saved at the end. 
It seems certain that Germany covers in twelve years 
just what our schools cover in fourteen, and does it 
better. But the investigation and remedying of such 
conditions belongs not to the pedagogical department 
but to the administrative. The latter must find out 
ways of doing good work in less time, and with less loss 
of time. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE MARKING SYSTEM IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

In ''Individual Training in Our Colleges"' it was 
shown that in the earlier days marks were used solely 
to determine the relative rank of the students upon the 
commencement programme, and never to "bust out" of 
college ; but that now the marking system survives as the 
sole test of college work, yet in the crudest possible form 
of a decimal or a, b, c, d, e plan. In none of my read- 
ing of early college histories, biographies or scrapbooks 
have I been able to find a single instance where a stu- 
dent was dismissed for poor scholarship so long as he 
was not morally delinquent. On the other hand, a little 
more than fifty years ago there came up in the Yale 
faculty the case of a student whose standing was so low 
in his studies that James Hadley, professor of Latin, 
and the father of the present president of Yale, desired 
him dropped from college. But a professor who had 
special charge of religious interests and led the stu- 
dents' prayer meetings said that he had observed the 
young man in these meetings, and had noticed that he 
seemed gifted in prayer, and that he believed that his 
influence over his fellow-students was good; and that 
therefore he hoped that he would be retained. By a 
narrow vote the student was allowed to remain in col- 

»Pp. 57, 185-188, 192, 193.. 
245 



246 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

lege, but Professor Hadley remarked that he hoped that 
he would be given to understand that his position was 
"a precari-ous one." 

The valuelessness of the present college marking, or 
pedagogical, or administrative systems in giving a pro- 
fessor any acquaintance with his pupils, or in furnishing 
him with units of differing values by which to judge of 
the real results of his own work, is indicated by the fol- 
lowing extract from a letter from the treasurer of an 
important corporation in Boston: 

"I was lunching yesterday with a recent Harvard gradu- 
ate of high standing who told me that when some time ago 
he was asked for references to his professors he could give 
hone, for not one of them knew him." 

It is not probable that such a young man would have 
spent four years with a good business concern without 
leaving some permanent record behind him. If some of 
the best technical schools can get a thorough knowledge 
of the strong and weak points of their students, and thus 
find positions to which each student is fitted, the colleges 
ought to be able to accomplish something like this for 
their graduates. 

Recently application was made to some well-known 
educators engaged in normal work for an improved 
marking form, adapted to aid alumni in supervising the 
work of undergraduates in whose course they were per- 
sonally interested; that is, for a record which would have 
a definite meaning and value to some one besides the 
man who made it in his own blind hieroglyphics, which, 
even to him, have different values at different times and 
with different students. After several consultations the 



The Marking System 247 

assurance was given that it was practically impossible to 
better the present decimal or a, b, c, d, e form. There- 
upon the layman, acquainted with business forms, de- 
vised the blank given below. Admittedly, under present 
college conditions, this form can be adopted only in ex- 
ceptional cases, but that merely demonstrates the faulti- 
ness of those conditions. Moreover, the blank would 
not have its true value for the college unless it was jEitted 
into a general scheme and chart, and its results could 
be transcribed so as to check off the work of the class, 
teacher and department. This blank was originally 
prepared with the intention of aiding fraternity alumni 
who wished to give time and thought to the progress 
of undergraduates in whom they were interested, but 
at whose recitations they could not be present. It is 
offered merely as a suggestion upon which new marking 
systems might be based. It coincides with the ordinary 
decimal or a, b, c, d, e system only at the fourteenth 
heading: 

To Prof. : 



Note. — It is with the full approval and co-operation of the stu- 
dent that you are requested to fill out this paper. He has a copy of 
this blank, and knows that he is to be marked by you, and as well 
by some of his fellow students who are with him in your class — though 
he understands that he will not see the report. This system of grad- 
ing is part of an undertaking by which alumni friends of the student in 
question hope (a) that he will do better work in your subject, (b) 
that there will be a closer bond between preceptor and student; and 
that thereby information may be secured and recorded concerning 
his intellectual and moral characteristics which will be of value (c) in 
his future work in college, and (d) in giving him a start after leaving 
college. A duplicate is furnished for your own records. 

The following marking system is suggested, but any other, if ac- 
companied by explanation, may be used: A, 90 to 100; B, 80 to 89; 
C, 65 to 79; D, 50 to 64, E, below 50. Or with the same relative 
meanings respectively: High, Excellent, Fair, Passable, Failure. 



248 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

We trust that you will not fail to tell the student frankly in what 
he is lacking or doing poor work. We will cordially join with you in 
improving his work in your department, and his general growth in 
intellectual and moral character. We will be pleased to receive, 
confidentially or otherwise, any suggestions as to how we may aid 
either yourself or the student, and trust you will appreciate that, in 
asking your co-operation, we are attempting to effectually supplement 
your own good efforts in the student's behalf; and also that you will 
not hesitate to disregard any subdivision which you feel that for any 
reason you cannot fill out to advantage. 

To aid us in advising him concerning his work in and 
after college, will you kindly, so far as you con- 
veniently can, give us your estimate of the ability, 
in comparison with college students in general, of 

Name 

College 

Class 

Subject 

Instructor 

Date of this report 

Is your subject one of general culture, or is it 
one likely to be of direct use to him in his expected 
life work? 





In subject 


Tn 




pursued 
under you. 


general. 


I. Interest in subject, as shown by 






(a) Punctuality. 






(b) Regularity of attendance. 






(c) Cuts. 






2. Attention in classroom. 






(a) Courteousness toward teacher. 






(b) Reading newspapers, listlessness, 
etc. 
3. Accuracy of mental action. 










(a) Grasp of main points of subject. 






(b) Grasp of finer distinctions of sub- 
ject. 
(Note especially mental slovenli- 










ness, inaccuracy or lack of definite 






understanding of subject.) 






4. Accuracy of expression. 






(a) Oral (in recitations). 






(b) In written exercises. 







The Marking System 



249 







In subject 


In 






pursued 
under you. 


general. 


5- 


English. 

(a) Orthography. 

(b) Expression. 

(c) Range of vocabulary. 

(d) Chirography. 

(e) Neatness of written or blackboard 

exercises. 






6. 


Perseverance (including thoroughness). 

(a) Determination to master obscure 

points. 

(b) Readiness to do extra work if nec- 

essary to master subject. 

(c) Interest in general reading and 

sidelights on subject. 






7- 


Originality. 

(a) AbiHty to form independent judg- 

ment. 

(b) Ability to logically maintain same. 

(c) Ability and willingness to take ini- 

tiative among his fellow students 
(leadership). 






8. 


Co-operative spirit. 

(a) With you. 

(b) With his fellow students. 






9- 


Faithfulness (sense of responsibility). 

(a) With you. 

(b) With his fellow students. 






10. 


As a student, does he learn 

(a) With difficulty. 

(b) With ordinary ease. 

(c) Quickly. 






II. 


Is his memory 

(a) Poor. 

(b) Fair. 

(c) Superior. 






12. 


Is his general work with you 

(a) Brilliant. 

(b) Excellent. 

(c) Ordinary. 

(d) Plodding. 

(e) Poor. 






13- 


Does he, apparently, pass his examina- 
tions principally 

(a) By cramming. 

(b) On general work through the term. 

(c) By a combination of both. 







250 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 



14. Give his grade in work as marked and 

reported under the rules of your in- 
stitution. 

15. In your opinion is his work unfavorably 

affected 

(a) By the state of his health. 

(b) By his habits. 

(c) By his social, athletic or other dis- 

tractions. 

(d) By his feeling that his work in your 

department is not relatively of 
major importance. 

(e) By inadequate preparation in this 

or other departments. 

(f) By any other conditions. 

16. Please note 

(a) Improvement since last report. 

(b) Since first report. 

(c) Particular failings or faults (intel- 

lectual, moral or otherwise). 

(d) Strong characteristics (intellectual, 

moral or otherwise). 

(e) Suggestions. 



In subject 

pursued 

under you. 



In 
general. 



As already noted, such a blank as this would be faulty 
unless made a part of a complete system. The informa- 
tion here asked for could be much more easily given by 
a high-school teacher than by a college professor or lec- 
turer. Then why not have some such record follow a 
boy to college as well as through it ? In many factories 
a cost card accompanies a piece of machinery or other 
product throughout the whole process of its manufac- 
ture. Can we not do as much for our boys and their 
instructors — to make their work more simple, scientific 
and effective? 

Under a separate administrative department it would 
not be difficult to have a large card or paper on which 
this information could be charted for the use of the ex- 



The Marking System 251 

ecutive, administrative and instructional departments, 
and for those in the student life department who were 
attempting to insure that the young man found himself 
in college and that his training therein should develop 
one hundred per cent of the best stuff that was in him 
for efficient citizenship. This chart would also enable 
an earnest student to see himself through the eyes of his 
teachers, and would furnish a reference in future life 
such as is not now obtainable. 

With such a marking system there would be needed 
a "follow-up" plan which would be pretty closely mod- 
eled after those in use in an ordinary business office. 

In the reorganized college it will be presupposed that 
substantially all the students will complete their course; 
not that fifty per cent — about the present average — ^will 
fail to graduate. Hence a marking system will not be 
used chiefly to determine whether a student has "skinned 
through" on "soft culture" courses on a sixty per cent 
or D basis; else we shall soon seek a new head for our 
administrative department. 

From the dean of one institution I have received the 
following concerning a system of marks which is in force 
therein, and under which a degree may be obtained in 
less than four years : 

"It can be argued in favor of the system that it enables 
the bright student to graduate sooner than the dull student. 
But it is argued, and I believe effectively, that 

"(i) It enables and encourages the student to seek soft 
courses, so that it is the politician who gets out early, rather 
than the student with serious purpose. 

"(2) It enables scheming professors to trade in high 
grades and thus make their class rooms popular. [It would 



252 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

not do for an outsider and a layman to suggest that this 
really occurs ! ] 

"(3) It draws the student's attention to marks rather 
than to the subject matter. 

"(4) The tendency is to encourage specialization in the 
line easiest for the student, rather than the broad scholarship 
and culture essential, especially in the early years of the 
course. 

"The members of the faculty are about equally divided, 
rather against than for." 

This statement indicates that the system in question 
has many good points, and that its bad points come 
from the failure to supervise and, from time to time, to 
correct the system by a separate administrative bureau. 
This is the weakness of many administrative reforms 
proposed by the pedagogic department. They do not 
go quite far enough ; they are not quite perfect from an 
administrative standpoint, and are not under a separate 
department w^hich must produce good results or be 
marked a failure. Hence they do not work quite satis- 
factorily and therefore are unjustly condemned. An 
administrative system vi^ithout povi^er to enforce its be- 
hests and not backed by the sentiment of the establish- 
ment is largely ineffective. It is right here that most 
college experiments are inherently weak. 

A really comprehensive marking system ought to be 
one of the most important features of the course, for (a) 
it would enable the teacher to analyze and note, under 
standardized and comprehensive headings, the mental 
and moral characteristics of each student, so that the 
teacher could do the best work on and for him; (6) it 
would furnish a permanent and intelligible record for 
the use of each succeeding teacher, and (c) of the college 



The Marking System 253 

wasre heap or other bureaus, and {d) for future refer- 
ence in after-college days ; {e) it would enable the student 
himself, and (/) those outside of the college who are fol- 
lowing his course and advising him therein, to have an 
intelligible record of his weak and strong points, which 
would go far toward getting better results out of his 
college course; and {g) it would help the administrative 
department to keep tab on the professor's work. 

This point can be made clearer by a story which a 
successful college president in the West delights to tell 
of himself. When a tutor he went to the president of 
the institution, and rather boastfully told how he had 
flunked out fifty per cent of his freshman class in 
mathematics. The president said to him in reply: "If 
I had hired you to drive one hundred sheep to Omaha, 
and you came back and boasted, in such a self-com- 
placent spirit, that you had lost fifty by the way, do you 
think that I would give you another hundred sheep to 
drive to Omaha next year? This present college year 
is not yet ended and another year is before us!" The 
younger man says that he dates his pedagogical educa- 
tion from that conversation, and from the chastening of 
his spirit which came from this practical application of 
business principles to college instruction and affairs. 

In other words, the marking system should be con- 
sidered in the light of an affirmative help in aiding a 
student to find himself and to train himself for efficient 
citizenship, rather than as a means of flunking him out 
of college, or even as a means to test his rank therein, or 
to frighten him into doing better work ; as an aid to the 
college in doing its duty to the state rather than a means 



254 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

to reduce the numbers in a freshman class admitted with- 
out any proper selection or limitations, and which over- 
taxes the capacity of the institution. 

Admittedly, such a marking system as that outlined 
above cannot be successfully used under present college 
conditions, where each instructor has classes numbering 
from forty to a hundred. But pray what is there in the 
present college conditions, judged by their results and 
the size of the college waste heap, which would justify 
us in giving them much consideration? Present college 
administrative and student life methods must in large 
part be dropped and new ones substituted. In the re- 
organized college the ideals will be so changed, and the 
new marking system so necessary in enabling us to work 
out these ideals, that we shall willingly reduce our 
classes to twenty, fifteen or even ten if needed to bring 
out the best which is in the teacher and transmit it to 
the pupil under the most favorable conditions. We 
shall then be thinking of the student's future achieve- 
ments and not of his marks or diploma; of the reciprocal 
joy of teaching and being taught; of the fair fame of 
Alma Mater, and of her duty as a nourishing mother of 
forceful and completely equipped citizens; and we shall 
make every minor end bend to these greater ones — even 
as we do now on the football field. The colleges and 
universities cannot hope to be real leaders of the com- 
monwealth while they are so far behind the great busi- 
ness corporations in ideals and methods, and while they 
take such pride in losing fifty per cent of their sheep on 
the way to the great market place where the country is 
waiting for them and needs them. 



The Marking System 255 

If there is to be a revised and comprehensive marking 
system, let it also be used to promote a healthy rivalry 
within the college itself and between allied institutions 
in all parts of which a similar system shall be in force. 
Let such a method be used to demonstrate which de- 
partment is doing the best work for citizenship — phys- 
ics or chemistry; the ancient or the modern languages; 
literature or history. Moreover, there are triangular or 
other leagues for intercollegiate athletics which are re- 
organized as the just and fair grouping of institutions 
which have about the same local surroundings and 
about the same number of students. These natural 
rivals might well compete on higher intellectual and 
educational levels, and generously collaborate over their 
common problems of the college marking system and 
waste pile, and of administrative methods and results. 
But if this is to be at all successful, these matters in 
which there is rivalry must be largely standardized. 
Football and other intercollegiate athletic contests are 
possible upon a large scale only because they take place 
under absolutely identical rules, under which there can 
be true rivalry, yet full play for individuality. This en- 
lightened rivalry and competition would make all work, 
within and without the college walls, more interesting 
and inspiring. Fair and intelligent competition is the 
life, not only of trade, but of a popular education for all, 
such as we are attempting to give in this country. But 
fair competition implies similar standards of measure- 
ment. Hence the educational and administrative de- 
partments of our reorganized colleges will seek for the 
true standardizing of their marking and other systems 



256 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

of measurement, so that there may be, not only compe- 
tition, but intelligent and uplifting correlation and com- 
parison. 

The new marking system, if thoroughly understood 
by the pupil, ought to develop in him that quality and 
sense which the good teacher so longs for and seeks to 
inspire — the sense of individual and personal responsi- 
bility in the pupil, which attunes him to the soul of the 
instructor and breeds eagerness to learn ; which inspires 
teacher and taught, turns the task into a pleasure, fos- 
ters true culture and scholarship, gives real individual 
training and fits for the largest usefulness in the future. 

This is the training for life which the college should 
aim at. In so far as it does not give it, it fails in its duty 
to the state and to the individual. 

But, dear pedagogue, you will never fully reach this 
goal until you turn your two dead departments of ad- 
ministration and student life over to other hands and 
give your attention to pure pedagogy. Unload all these 
extraneous things and commit them to the care of ex- 
perts in those lines; avail yourself of the experience of 
your business alumni, and devote yourself, as never be- 
fore, to your own specialty in which you can never yet 
have done your best work ; for never yet have you had 
the benefit of the trained "interference" of a well-con- 
ducted and coordinate college administrative depart- 
ment and the help of a well-ordered student life. Pray 
that that time may soon come, and hasten it on in every 
way. Do not oppose it, but rather demand it as your 
right, and as something to which you are entitled under 
modern business methods, which have as their one 



The Marking System 257 

great object that the producers shall be provided with 
the best available material, machinery and service sur- 
roundings, to the end that they may turn out the very 
best possible work — not in quantity so much as in 
quality — of which they as individuals are capable. 
Have you never dreamed of what heights of accomplish- 
ment in acquiring and imparting knowledge you could 
reach under the most favorable circumstances, or of 
what good original work you were capable? It will be 
a long and weary task to undo all past mistakes and 
make real progress on the new road, and possibly you 
are too old to see ideal conditions prevail in your own 
day; but for the sake of the rising generations of teachers 
and taught, do what you can to inaugurate and set for- 
ward this auspicious change. You have been the vic- 
tim of a vicious system or lack of system. Help to cut 
the Gordian knot for your successors. You cannot do 
so more effectively than by the formulation and wide and 
intelligent adoption of a standardized and modern mark- 
ing system which will give a few of the advantages of the 
cost system found in every up-to-date factory. 



CHAPTER XXII 

STUDYING THE COLLEGE WASTE HEAP 

Many business alumni would like nothing better than 
the time and opportunity to work over and study our 
college waste heaps, both so far as they relate to the 
losses among students and teachers. It would be a 
delicate task, requiring the greatest tact and wisdom. 
In the new administrative department, the waste-heap 
bureau will be the place of highest honor and of surest 
reward. 

College methods have often been so crass and un- 
scientific that sometimes their student waste heaps about 
equal in size their so-called finished product; and fifty 
per cent of this latter would be scrapped in a well-run 
factory — not stamped with its trade name and sent out 
as a fair sample of its finished product. Surely the col- 
leges ought to have some ideals in the treatment of their 
waste heap and by-products, which would approach to 
an approximation of those of thousands of business cor- 
porations of our land. The Standard Oil Company 
could teach the colleges hundreds of points in which 
they could improve their administration, and especially 
how they could study and reduce their waste products. 
Nothing could seem more unpromising than crude pe- 
troleum, yet under proper study and the supervision of 

258 



Studying the College Waste Heap 259 

an administrative department it has been made to yield 
more than 200 by-products. 

One large manufacturing concern has a magnificently 
organized corps of 150 chemists who daily collaborate 
and compare their work upon by-products and new 
products. 

On the students' side the college waste pile is made 
up, in a broad sense, of those men who have not gotten 
all of the training and development, mental, moral and 
physical, of an education for citizenship which the in- 
stitution might and should have given them; who have 
fallen short of what they had the ability to become, 
judged not by the present college marking system, but 
by the larger test of their fitness for the best life's work 
for which they might have been trained. It is a sad 
commentary on some college authorities that they will 
think this a harsh and impossible rule to apply in their 
factory, but it is a just rule which is sternly enforced in 
every other great factory. When the administrative 
and student life departments have been resurrected and 
restored to their proper places in the college economy, 
the present objectors will be the first to acknowledge 
their mistake, to admit that they could not have ex- 
pected to do their best work as instructors under 
present conditions, and much less in addition to do well 
the work of two other coordinate but essentially dis- 
tinct college departments, which were ready and anxious 
to do their part, if the instructors would but consider the 
matter in a common-sense way and not attempt to do 
their own and the others' share. 

But in a much narrower and less true sense, the col- 



26o The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

lege waste pile is in part made up of those students who 
have not completed their college course, or who have 
made a self-evident failure in their life's work because 
of unfortunate conditions in college. 

It begs the question to say that these men are better 
for having had some taste of a college life even if they 
did not finish their course. This may or may not be 
true. They might have profited quite as much if this 
time had been spent elsewhere. The real question is, 
Did the college do its full duty for citizenship upon 
these men, and fully exert upon them the power to that 
end which the commonwealth, the parents, the students 
and the community had a right to demand of so richly 
endowed a public servant? Shall we insist that our 
street railroads shall give transfers and mulct them 
heavily for not doing so, and not demand an equally 
punctilious fulfillment by the colleges of their far higher 
duties? 

It has been said that a well-to-do college-educated 
man represents a direct and indirect cash investment of 
about $25,000 before he is able to support himself. 
What an upheaval, investigation and reform there would 
be in a well-ordered factory if but a few $25 machines 
produced by it were failures, and would not work satis- 
factorily, and were returned by dissatisfied customers. 
Yet apparently no college has thought of intelligently 
studying its $25,000 failures, or even of introducing a 
comprehensive set of blanks or marking system which 
would lay the foundation for such a study. Many in- 
stitutions graduate only fifty per cent of those who enter. 
The careful manufacturer would say that such a loss 



Studying the College Waste Heap 261 

must be charged either to the productive or the admin- 
istrative department. There can be no doubt as to 
where this loss must now be charged in the colleges — 
for as yet they have no separate administrative depart- 
ment. Hence the loss must be charged directly to that 
department which still insists upon exercising and con- 
trolling the administrative functions of the institution. 
Pedagogic administration is chargeable with a pretty 
heavy loss when it delivers in a completed state only 
fifty per cent of the splendid raw material annually com- 
mitted to its care, and much of this fifty per cent is not 
in the best marketable condition! 

To the college waste heap must also be added every 
tutor and professor whose earlier high ideals and prom- 
ise for original research and fruitful teaching have been 
killed out by the drudgery and misapprehension en- 
tailed by a lack of an up-to-date administrative depart- 
ment. The misfit teachers, who could have done fine 
work under different surroundings, must also swell the 
pile; and possibly also the alumni who could and would 
have done good work for Alma Mater if she had had a 
wise administrative department, which had charted all 
her weak spots and was looking for the right man with 
whom to strengthen them. 

A proper study of the college waste pile would pro- 
vide for working over the past, not so much with the 
hope of rescuing much available material, but rather 
to obtain data for future guidance and to enable us to 
analyze and minimize our future failures. But our best 
results must come from present work on present ma- 
terial, along wise and far-reaching lines, trusting that 



262 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

each year these lines will broaden before us. If each 
year does not show better methods, higher ideals and 
a smaller waste heap than ever before — a larger per- 
centage of the sheep delivered at market, and in a better 
condition for that particular market at that particular 
time — ^we may rest assured that our study is upon 
wrong lines or with the wrong human agents, and that 
there must be a change; for good results always follow 
a proper study of waste heaps and by-products. 

An earnest endeavor to redeem the waste of a busi- 
ness necessarily implies a careful scrutiny of every part 
of that business and a willingness to follow where such 
quest legitimately leads. Therefore we shall, first, sub- 
mit our entering material to a careful test, and constantly 
seek to improve its character before we undertake to 
treat it; second, unceasingly and sternly test and im- 
prove our own subsequent methods with and treatment 
of that material; third, bend every energy to make sure 
that all external and internal agencies work to the good 
of our students, fostering those which are advantageous 
and counteracting those which are adverse; fourth, 
keep a comprehensive record and marking system of 
every student and of all the larger and smaller details 
of the college, and constantly compare and use these; 
and, fifth, so far as possible, insure that our graduates 
"catch on" after college, and have a fair opportunity 
to make the best use of the training which we have 
given them. 

We shall aim to know whether the cause of a failure 
lies in the parents' home, or the earlier schooling or the 
college; and if in the latter, in which of its planes or 



Studying the College Waste Heap 263 

courses. This knowledge must become more and more 
precise each year as we study and classify our waste 
heap, and the methods of the colleges must be stand- 
ardized so that this studying may be fruitful of results. 

There is enough in this programme to engage the at- 
tention of the most important bureau in the new admin- 
istrative department, which must be headed by the best 
men, and be given every means necessary to apply and 
test its rules. 

We shall soon come to value our great institutions, not 
so much by their buildings, or the amount of their funds, 
or by their past good work and reputation, or by their 
size, or by the number of their courses or electives, as by 
the relative smallness of their waste piles; by their ad- 
mitted failures rather than by their presumed successes 
on the diploma basis. 

And let us trust that in the future there may be set up 
some governmental bureau or agency, with power to re 
quire each institution of higher learning to submit item- 
ized annual reports, thoroughly standardized and of the 
most searching and comprehensive character, whereby 
parents and students and the public may judge of the 
relative merits of the various institutions and the size of 
their waste heaps; and whereby the institutions them- 
selves may check off, compare and constantly and in- 
telligently improve their own methods and results. If 
the United States Department of Education were au- 
thorized to require of the colleges one-tenth part of the 
detailed information which the Division of Statistics and 
Accounts of the Interstate Commerce Commission de- 
mands of the railroads, it would soon work a revolution 



264 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

in college methods, and make the waste pile almost a 
negligible quantity ; and at the end of a decade everyone 
would be amazed at the improved condition of educa- 
tion throughout the country, and no one would be will- 
ing to do away with the new methods and requirements 
or go back to the old. If the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission can require the railroads to spend annually 
millions of dollars, to the end that their exact physical 
and financial conditions and results can be accurately 
exhibited before those who are interested to know about 
these things, why should we not at least strive toward 
some such goal with regard to the college youth of our 
land? 

Why should not the general government and the states 
and municipalities, which have given and are giving, 
directly and indirectly, such enormous endowments, 
subsidies and special privileges to these favored public 
servants, and which are spending annually such huge 
amounts in preparing students for the colleges without 
expense to the latter, demand a strict annual accounting 
in standardized forms of reports which the wayfaring 
man, though only the father of a college undergraduate, 
may read? Why should not such privileged public 
servants eagerly demand that they shall be given the 
opportunity to prove their leadership in all which tends 
for the good of the commonwealth, by being required to 
make a more comprehensive and comprehensible annual 
report than any other public corporation? When such 
a time arrives, a college education will be of greater 
economic value because it will mean more to all con- 
cerned. 



Studying the College Waste Heap 265 

The tests and methods applied to our great railroads 
ought not to be too good to be applied to our colleges, 
which are presumed to be training our future citizens 
and problem solvers, and which may and must mold the 
course of our future history. Certainly we ought not to 
be too proud to go to experienced railroad and corpo- 
rate reorganizers, many of whom are college men, for 
help in solving the administrative problems of our col- 
leges and in reducing their waste piles. Possibly the 
learned professor of economics, who is in charge of the 
statistics and accounts of the Interstate Commerce Com- 
mission, could point out the value to our colleges of an 
exhaustive charting of their mistakes and shortcomings 
by means of a proper system of accounts, and could at 
least assist in the preparation of such a set of blanks, 
and could do as good work in standardizing college 
methods as he has in railroading. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

EXAMINATIONS IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

The ordinary college examinations have degenerated 
into senseless adjuncts to an archaic marking system, 
where they serve as a bugaboo and measuring rod. A 
higher use is set out in the following quotation from Dr. 
Canfield's report, already referred to : 

"There seems to be a clear understanding, in both Eng- 
land and France, that an examination should test both the 
acquisition of knowledge and the ability to use knowledge; 
or both knowledge and power. To these two characteris- 
tics many instructors add a third — promise. It is very gen- 
erally admitted that the first characteristic predominates, if 
it does not dominate, the work of pupils up to sixteen years 
of age; that the second is increasingly recognized through 
the years of college life; and that the third leads in all 
graduate work. It is also clearly understood that every 
examination will show something of each quality, and that 
every examination is quite as much a test of the teacher as 
of the pupil or student. With much lamentation it is quite 
freely admitted that few examinations establish much, if any, 
test of either power or promise, but are perfunctory and 
mechanical tests of acquisition of knowledge, of the existence 
of knowledge, of mere memory; and that the reason for this 
is to be found in the indolence and ignorance of instructors, 
both those of the college and university and of the secondary 
school: ignorance, because so few instructors are willing to 
make any study of methods, of any part of either the history 
or psychology of education; indolence, because it is so much 
easier to use old formulas than to study the boy and his 
work, and set an examination the result of which will really 

266 



Examinations 267 

add to the teacher's knowledge of both, and be a stimulus 
to the pupil in all future endeavor. 

"For every examination either stimulates or stultifies; the 
intellect is either better or worse because of what it has en- 
countered; either the whole man has been quickened into 
new life by what ought to be a sudden and unexpected 
emergency which the student must meet and master, or he 
has become more sodden and helpless because of renewed 
manifestations of lifelessness on the part of the instructor. 
Because of this very positive power for either good or evil, 
the examination should be most carefully studied, most thor- 
oughly understood, and above all most wisely and thoroughly 
supervised. . . . Sooner or later, every man must face an 
emergency, must meet a crisis which, swift and unexpected in 
its coming, calls for sharp concentration of all his faculties 
and powers, for supreme and continuous effort till the victory 
is won. Examinations which are without notice, and which 
do not come at stated intervals, train men in this mental 
self-control and alertness, in this swift marshalling of all 
forces, with an irresistible forward movement, a rush to the 
front of horse, foot and field guns. With such examinations, 
stimulating in the highest degree, a true master in educa- 
tion, if not overburdened with students, can determine the 
success of his students without formal 'finals' or any me- 
chanical gage." 

Dean R. C. Bentley, of Clark College, says of exam- 
inations in connection with the marking system: 

"A single illustration will show the ridiculous inade- 
quacy of our present 'marking,' even to distinguish types 
of mind not to say individual powers. If the college has a 
right to demand anything in student mind, it is the stage 
at which some thinking of a mature sort may be expected. 
The demands of college studentship may not be considered to 
be satisfied vdth anything less than an assimilation by which 
there may be exhibited actual mental energy, generated by 
one's own mental machinery. Shall we be surprised to 
find that a high mark is used to represent the brilliant work 
of a superficial man? There is too likely to be a high mark 



268 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

of approval for the student who returns intact, upon exam- 
ination, just what he got from his instructor. Oh for a 
race of teachers free to say: 'Thou unprofitable miser of 
the scraps of others' ready made wisdom, preserved in the 
folded napkin of a complacent mind against examination 
day; thou oughtest to have so invested as to show at least 
the legal rate of interest ! ' 

"Any machinery of marks that makes it unnecessary for a 
teacher, as the most important part of his functions, to dis- 
tinguish, not only such two types of mind, but individual 
differences of mind, decreases his chance to do real teaching 
and loads the balances for false weighing." 

Examinations in their present sense and use may even 
disappear in our reorganized college because they will 
be as unnecessary and useless as in the case of the faith- 
ful clerk in a business office. If through an ideal col- 
lege administrative system a close touch between master 
and pupil can be established, promotion will come from 
faithful work, not from cramming and cribbing. Im- 
proved instruction will contribute a small fraction to- 
ward this result, but improved administration the major 
part, because it will make instruction more effective and 
rewarding. Final examinations will come to be recog- 
nized as an undesirable evil, not as a necessary end, and 
will be dispensed with so far as possible. If they are 
used at all, it will be rather as a climax for the pupil but 
as a test for the teacher, in which both teacher and 
taught will be equally interested in ascertaining if the 
pupil has made good. Everyone knows that the final 
football games are a test for the coach and his methods 
and work, but the climax of the season for the players. 
The coach is paid for his services, but the team, with no 
pecuniary reward, work toward the great climax for 



Examinations 269 

Alma Mater's glory. The coach is not trying to see 
what low marks he can award for slovenly term work, 
to be supplemented by cramming and a final examina- 
tion, but rather is striving to teach the fine points of the 
game, even to the scrub, so that at the end there may be 
no failure. The reorganized college will have this same 
spirit, for it is the spirit of a well-organized office or 
business. There the test is not that of a lying marking 
system supplemented by more unreliable examinations, 
but that of a general and actual growth of the individual, 
so as to rise to higher and higher planes and cope suc- 
cessfully with greater and greater responsibilities. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

DISCIPLINE IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

Discipline, according to the notions of the earher 
college, has substantially disappeared in modern times. 
Disorder in the class room is now practically unknown 
and would be entirely so if the classes were of the proper 
size. Any attempt to regulate the manners and habits 
of the college home has to all intents and purposes been 
abandoned in our quasi state. It is now the office of 
our colleges to train their students in their duties as 
citizens, and to teach them to govern themselves, as al- 
ready indicated. 

Under a well-conducted college administrative de- 
partment, disciplinary measures will become a negligible 
quantity. The distinction between instruction and the 
college home life will be clearly thought out and main- 
tained. Any disorders in the class room will be almost 
unthinkable, while those in the student life will be dealt 
with under rules which apply to that department, and 
not to the pedagogical and administrative departments. 

The rules governing conduct in the instructional de- 
partment will be few, well advertised and clearly under- 
stood, with well-defined penalties. The punishment 
will be made to fit the crime. 

At present college discipline reminds one forcibly of 
the story told by the head master of one of our great 

270 



Discipline 271 

preparatory schools. A small boy had been called be- 
fore him and, under strict cross-examination, was grad- 
ually disclosing a fearful laxity of discipline and dearth 
of good work in one of the houses, until finally the little 
fellow blubbered out: " But how was I to know that the 
teacher would draw the line at my dropping a live mouse 
down the back of his neck?" 

Nowadays college discipline is frequently, for months 
or years, more honored in the breach than in the ob- 
servance, and then suddenly the faculty find it neces- 
sary to save their face by making an example of some 
particular student who has been doing that which the 
faculty has winked at in numerous other instances. 
They arbitrarily draw the line at the live mouse. 

Oftentimes the general tone of a college is poor and 
the discipline lax, until the students come to feel, quite 
naturally, that they have a kind of preemptive right in 
their privileges which have existed from time imme- 
morial, or in an ordinary college for over four years. 
Suddenly, without warning, the autocratic power of 
the college is invoked, and a custom arbitrarily swept 
aside which had seemed to the students to be among 
their vested rights. This course engenders a spirit of 
anger and revolt. A small amount of forethought in dis- 
cussing matters with the undergraduates would have 
brought almost a cheerful acquiescence upon the part 
of the student body. Conditions which appear easy in 
business are often considered as oppressive in college, 
because therein they are autocratically imposed and 
enforced by the institution instead of being assumed 
by the student body, as might be easily brought about. 



272 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

A lawyer appreciates that human justice is very hu- 
man, and a thoughtful observer sometimes feels that 
this is truest of college justice. A wise and proper ad- 
ministrative department will practically eliminate all 
need of discipline and not glory in the sudden revival 
of dead-letter laws or the enactment of blue laws, ap- 
plied "steady by jerks." 

Fair notice will be given of change of rules and regu- 
lations, and the earnest cooperation of the students will 
be insured through a full realization of plans and pur- 
poses, and by the concurrent effort of dominant influ- 
ences among the students — that is, in the student life 
department. Student sentiment is justly outraged by 
many cases of flagrant injustice, such as is set forth 
in the following letter from a well-known New York 
lawyer : 

"I have a son just graduated from college. He was de- 
barred from strenuous athletics by his physique. He is a 
good student, above the average, for he passed the best 
entrance examination of all applicants in 1903, and yet, so 
far as I can judge, he is not thought of as he would be if he 
had high athletic standing — either by the institution or his 
college mates. He was not individualized but simply one 
of a mass, and taught, marked, heard and considered as 
such. I do not mean to be understood as complaining be- 
cause he is my son. I refer to him simply as a case fit for 
illustration, because it is the one I know of. My son did 
not take honors on graduation, because — it is almost too 
absurd to be credible — in the sophomore year, although he 
had nearly all A's and only one or two B's in his subjects, 
he had F in Gymnastics, and he received F because he had 
overcut two half hours at the gymnasium. He did not 
know it, was not notified, and hence did not make them 
up, as he easily could have done. His class was the first 
when overcuts in Gym. were considered as data in making 



Discipline 273 

up honors. So his honors were gone irretrievably, for, no 
matter how high his marks would have been in Junior and 
Senior years, he could not get Final Honors. His ambitio is 
were, therefore, blunted; and he lost his incentive. It seemed 
and still seems unjust to him and a reflection on the college 
system." 

This is an example of the vices of the autocratic system 
of the college, which has many of the faults of any auto- 
cratic regime. It has the student largely in its power, 
for he has made his investment of tuition, and furniture, 
and time spent along its fixed curriculum, which prob- 
ably will not be applicable in another institution and 
hence will be wasted if he withdraws. The college 
knows its power, and often uses it foolishly and un- 
fairly. Under like circumstances no merchant would 
say to a clerk who had made some foolish, and probably 
boyish and pardonable, error: "You are in my power, 
for I have such a hold upon you that you must submit 
when I fine you two months' pay, or decree that you 
must work without extra pay three hours overtime every 
day for three months." On the contrary, the mer- 
chant says: "You are of full age and understanding. 
Either fill your position to the very best of your ability 
and work for the general good, or resign." No ship 
ever yawed more than does college pedagogy when it 
essays to steer the discipline of a modern institution of 
higher learning. Faculty control of discipline in our 
modern institutions is inherently wrong and certain 
to be a snare and a failure. It entirely lacks the per- 
sonal acquaintance with general and individual condi- 
tions which made faculty control partially successful 
in earlier days. 



274 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

Undoubtedly, the college has certain rights and 
powers over its students, but they are far less than in 
the old boarding-school colleges, and are to be exercised 
in far different manner and spirit and to a far different 
end. But the student also has his rights which his pred- 
ecessors did not have, and which should be respected 
by the college, not in a perfunctory, haphazard way, as 
where he is at the mercy of some cross-grained or prej- 
udiced professor who can cost him "his incentive" and 
leave a bitter feeling of injustice which never ceases to 
rankle in his breast. Many a time we hear college 
graduates tell of what they feel was a gross injustice 
done to them years before by some professor. In such 
instances there should have been some administrative 
power guarding Alma Mater's good name and work, 
which could deal out even-handed and intelligent jus- 
tice, or, if necessary, separate two uncongenial individ- 
uals who never could or would get on together. 

The separate administrative department will do away 
with all star-chamber methods. It will reverse the 
Puritanical notion that discipline of the young is for 
punishment, and will adopt the modern idea that it is 
for reform and moral growth. College discipline must 
necessarily be very faulty until our colleges, and es- 
pecially the student life department, are properly re- 
organized, and then — ^it will practically disappear. 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE WAITING LIST IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

In at least some reorganized colleges there will be a 
waiting list, for all college history proves that good work 
in any institution draws to it plenty — and often too 
much — of the best student material; just as truly as suc- 
cessful intercollegiate athletics draw driftwood, which 
seldom remains more than a year or two, and which 
serves merely to clog and disarrange the machinery for 
earnest students, and thus causes deterioration in the in- 
stitution's plant, product and reputation. Students and 
parents recognize good work in a college. They are not 
afraid of fair restrictions or of high requirements. They 
are looking for individual training and broad prepara- 
tion for citizenship, and the college which gives the most 
and best of these will draw the largest number of the 
highest grade students. This plan has never yet been 
thoroughly tested, which is another indication of the 
comparatively low level of our college ideals. 

The waiting list will consist in part of those who are 
registered years ahead ; and in these cases the college will 
have an opportunity from year to year to know what 
kind of preparatory work each applicant is doing, and 
by that means assist, not only themselves and the sub- 

275 



276 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

freshmen, but also the preparatory schools in getting 
good work out of their students. The administrative 
department will have time to watch carefully such can- 
didates and their yearly progress, and to select the best 
material and that which is especially adapted to the 
instruction of that institution. In part the waiting list 
will consist of those who have been found wanting upon 
their entrance examinations and who are sent back for 
better preparation. The reorganized college will be for 
honest work, with a well-selected and pretty evenly 
matched lot of students, all thoroughly prepared, and 
not dragging on for four years some condition which un- 
fits both professor and student for getting the best re- 
sults out of the college course. A waiting list will be an 
eye-opener to both college and preparatory school and 
bring them closer together upon a common-sense under- 
standing of the sphere of each. Meanwhile the sub- 
freshman is between the upper and the nether mill- 
stones to an extent which would seem to a merchant or 
manufacturer to be not only unnecessary but scandalous. 
Furthermore, a waiting list might be a good vantage 
ground from which to study the waste pile of both col- 
lege and preparatory school. 

Under the proposed reorganization most institutions 
will have to cut down their entering classes from 
twenty-five to forty per cent, but they will graduate as 
many as they do now. There is to-day no fair test of 
the real capacity and efficiency of our institutions of 
higher learning. The nearest approximation to such a 
test is the size of their graduating classes, and not that 
of their entering classes. Yet the colleges always brag 



The Waiting List 277 

about large entering classes. They are the only great 
factory system with the perverted notion that an over- 
supply of raw material and a correspondingly large 
waste pile are a true test of the concern's greatness. 
They are the only place where the owners consider and 
boast of the number of sheep which start for market, 
and not of the number or condition of those which 
reach there. 

This falling off in the number of entering freshmen 
will at first appear to some unthinking alumni to be a 
sign of decadence, but they will be less likely to feel 
thus when they imderstand that there is an insistent 
waiting list, for this will indicate that the institution is 
held in even higher esteem than before, and thus the 
allegiance of the alumni will be retained and possibly 
their enthusiastic support be gained. 

There are thousands of parents to whom a waiting 
list would appeal, yet who cannot understand why a 
college should consider a large "busted out" list as any 
evidence of good work upon its part, or any reason why 
they should risk the future of their sons in that institu- 
tion. It would be far better if there was much more 
discrimination of this kind upon the part of parents, and 
if they combined to resist the tendency of the colleges 
to visit their own shortcomings upon the iimocent un- 
dergraduate and future citizen. 

Furthermore, the fact that many of the men thus 
"busted out" go from college into business positions, 
and, under the strict and wise rules there prevailing, 
make successes, will suggest to the thoughtless and in- 
nocent that many colleges ought to jack their adminis- 



278 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

trative methods and ideals up to the plane of the de- 
spised trusts and soulless corporations. 

This pride in a large "busted-out" list is sometimes 
taken to imply that the college has so high an educa- 
tional standard that many men cannot rise to the level 
which the college maintains in its curriculum. Yet we 
find that many of those who ultimately fail were the 
most promising students in the high schools from which 
they entered, and that they have failed because of the 
perverted conditions prevailing in the community and 
home life of the college student body. Under these cir- 
cumstances how can the institution fully perform its 
chief duty to the commonwealth of turning out good 
citizens and at the same time have a large "busted out" 
list?* 

Frequently freshmen are dropped from college be- 
cause their instructors are poor, and their classes too 
large, and other pedagogical conditions are thoroughly 
bad; and then the college plumes itself upon "its high 
standard of scholarship!" It might better say "its 
gross inefficiency and hypocrisy, and its fraud upon the 
commonwealth, the parents and the students." 

In connection with the waiting list would come up the 
whole question of who is to be admitted to the privileges 
of this quasi public corporation, to be trained therein 
for citizenship. The present prescribed entrance ex- 
aminations imperfectly cover a single side of but one of 
the many things which a college should know before it 
takes the risk of spoiling a young man's life, or of wast- 
ing its own time and disarranging its own rnachinery by 

> "Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 182, 183. 



The Waiting List 279 

taking in an improper student. The present system 
of uniform entrance examinations much resembles the 
equally well-known system of ready-made clothing — 
well adapted to the physical average of the human 
male or female, and nothing more. An ordinary ready- 
made garment is not adapted for the use of both sexes, 
nor does it fit those who are abnormally lean or fat, tall 
or short, or otherwise out of the average. Moreover, 
the fit of the garment gives us no criterion by which we 
may judge as to whether it comes within the means or 
the needs of the buyer. The sixty-dollar dress suit can- 
not be made to take the place of the laborer's two- 
dollar overalls and jumper. Unless distance or other 
conditions make it impossible, each candidate for en- 
trance to college should be personally examined by 
some wise and sympathetic hiember of the administra- 
tion, to ascertain whether he is likely to find himself and 
become a hundred per cent citizen in that institution 
rather than in some other, or whether he ought, upon 
any terms, to enter that college. In seven cases out of 
ten those things should be known long before the stu- 
dent enters, not after. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

ADVERTISING AND THE PUBLICITY BUREAU IN THE 
REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

If anyone doubts that the colleges are no longer 
schools based on the home, let him look at their adver- 
tising bureaus. If he still doubts that the colleges need 
reorganization, let him look at the manner in which 
some of them, especially in the past, have allowed these 
bureaus to prostitute the higher aims of the colleges 
themselves, to lower their public sentiment, debauch 
their homes, and pervert the future citizens who were 
being trained by this great public agency. Let him see 
how, too often, the advertising has changed position 
with the institution, and arrogated to itself the promi- 
nence which the institution had formerly and rightfully 
claimed as its own. In recent years, intercollegiate 
athletics have become primarily, and more than any- 
thing else, the great advertising medium of the Ameri- 
can college, and nothing like them exists in any other 
part of the world. They are the most spectacular col- 
lege product of the last twenty-five years of the nine- 
teenth century, and they have had their splendid uses 
In the absence of a separate college administrative de- 
partment, they have at a pretty heavy price turned us 
completely away from our old ideas of the round- 
shouldered, narrow-chested college student and his mid- 
280 



Advertising and the Publicity Bureau 281 

night (whale-oil) lamp. They have taught us to appre- 
ciate the value of physique and physical training, which 
we were likely to have forgotten in modern times. From 
the colleges this appreciation has spread to the whole 
body of youth throughout our land. But in doing this, 
and unnecessarily, and largely because they had no 
adequate, up-to-date administrative department, the 
colleges have substituted for their own former scholarly 
ideals those of the champion athlete and trainer ; and in 
too many instances they have actually sacrificed men 
who had in them the material for fine citizens. 

The net result may be best illustrated by a similar 
transition, but in the opposite direction. Not many 
years ago in a well-known reformatory it was found 
that, despite the most strenuous efforts, the moral ten- 
dency of the institution was thoroughly bad, and that 
instead of reforming its inmates it was steadily debasing 
them. This was because their greatest criminal was 
the boy hero of the majority of the inmates. That is to 
say, when a young man and first offender was com- 
mitted to the so-called reformatory, he was, under proc- 
ess of law of the commonwealth, put into an atmos- 
phere dominated by the notion that crime was not 
criminal if it was only sufficiently daring and successful. 
Some wise young college-bred men of the neighborhood 
felt that the thing to do was to change this boyish ideal. 
Accordingly, they started Sunday afternoon exercises 
which were given a high-sounding name, suggestive of 
ethics, sociology, etc. The very purpose of the move- 
ment would have been frustrated by calling it or making 
it a Sabbath school. The meetings were made exceed- 



282 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

ingly interesting, and gradually the boys were encour- 
aged to debate, write papers, and finally to publish a 
weekly journal. Undoubtedly, the ideas therein pro- 
mulgated were crude and crudely expressed, but the 
object sought was attained; for it shortly came about that 
the best debater and the best writer, the one who could 
express himself most forcefully by tongue or pen, became 
the hero of the inmates. By this wise but indirect course 
the ideals of the majority of the prisoners were com- 
pletely changed, and by wise use of this change in 
ideals the institution was enabled to become a real re- 
formatory instead of a place to make bad matters worse. 
The colleges have adopted about the same plan, but in 
the opposite direction and with opposite results. Ap- 
parently the hero of the college is its star athlete.' 
Nowadays when the undergraduates wish to induce 
subfreshmen to join their institution, they expatiate, 
not upon the president's preeminence, nor upon the 
scholarly attainment of the professors, nor upon the 
splendid fit for their future work as citizens which is 
given to the undergraduates, but upon the success of 
the athletic teams and the prowess of the coach and 
trainer. Until very recently, and in some cases even 
yet, all kinds of inducements, scholarships and pay- 
ments were held out, directly or indirectly, on behalf of 
the colleges to induce likely prep-school athletes to go 
to a redoubtable institution of intercollegiate athletics 
rather than to a notable institution of higher learning 
The colleges have had their reward! Their numbers 
and their wealth have increased beyond all their earlier 

» "Individual Training in Our Colleges," Chap. XXIV. 



Advertising and the Publicity Bureau 283 

dreams. The colleges have had their advertising but 
they have reaped the whirlwind. They have too often 
discredited their own higher aims by their disgraceful, 
dishonorable and dishonest use of what might have 
been proper means of physical exercise and of arousing 
college pride; and have too often unfitted their most 
promising students for splendid, fruitful citizenship in 
their after lives. They have overstimulated and over- 
developed their community life at the expense of their 
pedagogy and homes. 

The notion of a publicity bureau is much more 
generic and far-reaching than that of an advertising 
bureau. The latter is associated in our minds with the 
sale of goods or other direct monetary transactions. 
The former is far more comprehensive in its meaning 
and uses, for it applies to many things which have no 
relation to pecuniary affairs. By publicity, as its very 
name implies, is meant the making public or giving 
public currency to some information or report which 
otherwise would be unknown to those who should 
know of it. Publishing and publicity are more nearly 
synonymous than advertising and publicity. It is 
publicity when the state or any subdivision thereof 
publishes its laws or ordinances, or the annual or other 
reports of its officers, boards or commissioners. All of 
the bulletins published by the various departments at 
Washington are merely the products of the vast pub- 
licity system which the United States Government has 
developed more scientifically and beneficently than any 
other. The catalogue of a great library or university 
is a part of its publicity plan, and necessary to make its 



284 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

opportunities for good available in the widest way. It 
is in this broad sense that the word "publicity" is used 
here. 

The new and separate administrative department will 
not fail to have its carefully organized and efficient pub- 
licity bureau which will insure that its objects, regula- 
tions and proposed changes are fully made known, in an 
authoritative and intelligent way, to college authorities, 
alumni, students and parents, and to all others entitled 
to know what it is attempting to do; to the end that all 
factors in its new problems shall intelligently cooperate 
in their solution. This publicity bureau will serve to 
enlighten and to increase the interest of its own teachers 
and pupils, as well as of those without the college walls. 
In many factories there are posted every day in each de- 
partment the highest record, and the record of the pre- 
vious day, of that department and of the whole plant — ■ 
to the end that each operative shall take not only an in- 
telligent interest in his own machine and output, but in 
those of his fellows and of the whole factory. The poor 
work of any individual mechanic is resented by his 
fellows, for it lowers the general result of the depart- 
ment and of the entire plant. The reorganized colleges 
will have an intelligent publicity bureau which will help 
to promote team work and tune up the whole establish- 
ment. They will not encourage an external advertising 
bureau to boom their intercollegiate athletics, and yet 
consider it undignified to have a publicity bureau for 
proper scholastic purposes. They will know that there 
are other things than athletics in which the colleges 
ought to be proud of their records and of their members 



Advertising and the Publicity Bureau 285 

on the " All- America Team." This new bureau will 
learn, from its own football manager or from some suc- 
cessful business alumnus, many points on external pub- 
licity and on keeping up student and alumni interest. 
The object of such publicity will not be vainglory, but 
to promote team work, and college pride, and esprit de 
corps, and thus the good work of those who would other- 
wise be indifferent or lazy; and thereby assist the col- 
lege, and every part of it, in turning out better citizens. 

Especially at the first this publicity will be necessary 
for the department's own protection and to justify its 
innovations. For this department must expect to be 
the factor in the college with which the most fault will 
be found. The head of it must not be thin-skinned, for 
he will discover, as do others in like positions, that he 
will be the safety valve of the institution, and in the 
baldest way will be used to save the face of others. He 
will be like the city editor of a great newspaper or the 
managing clerk of a large law ol3ice, who often get litde 
credit for their good work, yet are blamed for their own 
mistakes and for the results of the mistakes of all who 
are under them — or above them. 

On this point a college professor writes: 

"It may be worth while noticing that the newspaper edi- 
tors are the chief obstacle in the way of making public the 
intellectual side of the college. They will not use this mat- 
ter but they cry for the other. This I know by experience." 

Publicity is but a minor branch of administration, 
but, like every other branch, an exceedingly important 
component part in a perfect whole. The publicity bu- 
reau will completely reverse what has been, too often, 



286 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

the star-chamber policy of the faculty. It will sys- 
tematically and conscientiously lay before all concerned 
in or with the college the institution's plan of fulfilling 
its duty to the commonwealth and to them, and appeal 
for their enthusiastic aid in attaining such high ends. 

The publicity bureau will be an interesting and im- 
portant agent in the college economy. It will often 
serve as the brake upon the whole administrative sys- 
tem, and as the preliminary test of any proposed re- 
forms. Our most successful presidents have been those 
who kept their ear to the ground, who knew the great 
heart of the people, and what the nation needed and 
could do. It is one thing to think out a plan or theory 
in private, and quite another to state it clearly, and 
justify it before the public. The latter will be one 
of the functions of the college publicity bureau; and a 
very important and sobering function it will be. Usually 
before it makes an important publication this bureau 
will have felt the college pulse and will have paved the 
way for a cordial acceptance of the new plans. 

The president of the Carnegie Foundation says: 

"College authorities have hitherto been inclined to take 
the position that the public is not concerned with the details 
of the financial administration of institutions of learning. 
I wish to urge that the policy of publicity in these matters 
is the only true one. The public which supports a college 
is entitled to know how the college income is spent, what 
proportion goes into administration, what salaries are paid, 
how much is spent in advertising and other details of ex- 
pense. It has been a source of strength to the state uni- 
versities that these details (including the exact pay of each 
officer and teacher) must be printed for public inspection. 
A thoroughgoing financial statement of investments, an- 



Advertising and the Publicity Bureau 287 

nual receipts and expenditures should be required by law of 
all chartered institutions. Colleges and universities should 
do this without legal requirement as a matter of good faith.'" 

But this is not going nearly far enough. The finan- 
cial condition and needs of the institution should be 
plainly and fairly stated at least once a month, and laid 
frankly before every alumnus, and before the parents 
of every undergraduate, and be put into the hands of 
everyone interested in the institution who asks for a 
copy of these statements. A high standard should be 
set for the financial needs of the college — say $400 per 
annum per student for instructional and other pur- 
poses, in addition to $100 for administration expenses. 
The number of students should then be strictly limited 
to this standard until the income for an increase in 
numbers has been supplied through the labors of the 
publicity bureau. 

In all earnestness I say to the colleges: "According 
to your faith, be it unto you!" You will get all the 
money you need, provided you constantly, honestly, 
frankly and wisely exhibit to your friends and alumni 
the real cost of maintaining a reorganized college, whose 
aim is to train every undergraduate so as to develop one 
hundred per cent of his capacity for future citizenship 
in all its planes. But do not be driven into the old mis- 
take of exceeding your capital. If a new and desirable 
departure is proposed which requires new expense, do 
not be afraid to ask where the money is coming from. 
Let him who proposes a new departure work out its 

* " The Financial Status of the Professor in America and in Ger- 
many," p. X. 



288 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

estimated expense and then provide it. But be sure to 
work the publicity bureau overtime in showing what the 
college is accomplishing. There is little need of beg- 
ging. -Good, clean work for citizenship will be fully 
appreciated and the money to extend it will be forth- 
coming. 

"According to your faith [and good faith], be it unto 
you!" 



CHAPTER XXVII 

STANDARDIZATION AND UNIFORMITY IN THE REORGAN- 
IZED COLLEGE 

I HAVE repeatedly had occasion to refer to the unfor- 
tunate results which come from the lack of standardiza- 
tion in our colleges, but this matter is so vital in the eyes 
of the reorganizer that it must be discussed by itself and 
its significance further demonstrated. 

In every important corporate interest, except the 
colleges, standardization has been one great step for- 
ward during the past forty years. The mind turns 
naturally to the railroad gauge of four feet eight and one- 
half inches at which our railway tracks have at last been 
made uniform. Yet at the first this was merely an 
adaptation of the gauge at which the wagons in the 
country had been previously standardized. But this is 
a very minor part of the great struggle for standardiza- 
tion which has enabled our railroads to bring about im- 
portant reductions in the cost of transportation. At 
first 

"the knowledge acquired by the officials of one company 
as the result of experiment and experience was unknown 
to the others, rarely communicated and sometimes jealously 
guarded." 

This has been completely changed, and almost entirely 
through the formation of the various railway associa- 

289 



290 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

tions which are national in their character. The chief 
aim of the following associations has been to standard- 
ize, improve and make uniform some particular branch 
of railroading, principally in administration : The Amer- 
ican Railway Association, The Master Car Builders' 
Association, the American Railway Master Car Me- 
chanics' Association, the International Association of 
Car Accountants and Car Service Officers, the Railway 
Transportation Association, the Association of Railway 
Telegraph Superintendents, the Train Dispatchers As- 
sociation of America, the International Association of 
Railway Surgeons, the National Association of Car 
Service Managers, the American Railway Engineering 
and Maintenance of Way Association, the American 
Association of General Passenger and Ticket Agents, 
the American Association of Traveling Passenger 
Agents, the American Association of General Baggage 
Agents, the Association of American Railway Account- 
ing Officers, the Association of Railway Claim Agents, 
and the Freight Claim Association. Other national as- 
sociations of railway officers and employees of the oper- 
ating department, also organized largely for the stand- 
ardization and improvement of the equipment and 
service, comprise superintendents of bridges and build- 
ings, master boiler makers, master car and locomotive 
painters, railway air-brake men, etc. It is through the 
standardization and uniformity brought about by the 
efforts of these and many other similar associations that 
railroad equipment is interchangeable; that freight may 
be sent anywhere without breaking bulk; that interline 
coupon tickets enable passengers to buy transportation 



Standardization and Uniformity 291 

from each principal point to all other principal points 
on the continent; in a word, that the railroads have 
been enabled to build up the country and its wealth, 
and thus to make some repayment for the enormous 
rights and powers which have been so freely conferred 
upon them as public servants. 

In the same manner there has been an ever-growing 
tendency toward standardization and uniformity in most 
trades and forms of manufacturmg. In many indus- 
tries imiform price lists have been used by every manu- 
facturer for thirty or forty years. The hundreds of 
different prices upon the list, covering all the articles 
manufactured, have not varied during that period, but 
the fluctuations have been merely in the discounts from 
the prices upon the list. The customer cannot and need 
not remember the exact former cost to him of a par- 
ticular article, but only whether the discount is greater 
or less in one instance than another. Nor need he re- 
member the prices of hundreds of sizes and kinds of 
pipes, couplings and fittings, but merely the relative 
discounts from a fixed and universal price list; that is, 
whether his discount was twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty- 
eight, thirty or thirty-five per cent from the listed 
price. 

So there is a constant tendency to standardization 
and uniformity in mechanical details; in sizes, gauges, 
threads and other things which in olden times not only 
differed in the product of different makers but in the 
product of each manufacturer. 

Standardization and uniformity tend to economy, in- 
creased use and demand, efficiency and improved re- 



292 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

suits. The same rule would apply as well in the col- 
leges if they would as intelligently apply it through an 
administrative department. 

I have already referred in Chapter I to the variety of 
form and content of our so-called colleges and univer- 
sities. A direct corollary of this is the immense loss of 
power and unnecessary lack of efficiency which result 
from the failure of the colleges to standardize and make 
uniform many of their processes and functions. Judg- 
ing the colleges as a whole, from the standpoint of the 
student — that is, that the college education is to enable 
him to find himself and then to train him to his utmost 
efjficiency in every plane of his future citizenship — the 
careful business observer is appalled at the enormous 
loss of future potentiality in citizenship, intellectual 
growth and true culture which is chargeable to the lack 
of standardization and uniformity in certain of the ad- 
ministrative and productive or instructional parts of the 
colleges. But this is evident also if the study is from 
any other standpoint than that of the student. The 
Carnegie Foundation has carefully scrutinized the col- 
lege economy, and summed up some of its discoveries 
in its Bulletins. It is instructive to note some of its 
conclusions as to the waste capital, income, material 
and opportunity caused by the lack of standardization 
and uniformity. 

As to the fundamental organization of the colleges, it 
finds the greatest diversity of conditions. More than 
half the institutions have a more or less direct connec- 
tion with religious denominations, but the report tabu- 
lates over fifty differing forms in which this connection 



Standardization and Uniformity 293 

is made. But even this diversity is further complicated, 
for the Second Bulletin says (p. 7) that 

"The state governments have themselves in all cases a 
system of education limited by state lines. The same de- 
nominations have erected colleges and universities in differ- 
ent states, so that the problem of higher education is almost 
necessarily studied from the standpoint of the state," 

and thereby the usual complications of denominational 
control correspondingly increased. Again: 

"It is evident that if the system of higher education is 
finally to have unity, strength and thoroughness, enormous 
sums of money must be spent to develop these numerous 
institutions, or else many of them must be in the end aban- 
doned. One can scarcely doubt that the latter course will 
finally come about by the mere progress of events, for there 
can be no doubt that many of these institutions are wholly 
unnecessary. They have been produced partly from a gen- 
uine interest in education; partly by denominational and 
local rivalry; sometimes by the enterprise of real-estate 
agents; and under a system of laws which allowed any 
group of men to come together and call the institution which 
they founded a college. There are in most states many 
more such institutions than are necessary for the work of 
higher education, and the multiplication of the number un- 
doubtedly lowers the general standard of institutions." 

In Appendix No. V will be found extracts from the 
Bulletin of the Carnegie Foundation showing some of 
the things as to which the colleges must be standardized. 
I know of no publications which are more instructive 
than those of the Foundation as to the problems, almost 
wholly administrative, of the colleges. 

But again, as already shown, there are vital differ- 
ences in the institutions themselves which demand in- 
ternal standardization. Not long ago the secretary of 



294 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

one of our largest universities told me that entering 
students in their arts and in their engineering courses 
were of about the same grade, coming mostly from the 
same high or other preparatory schools. "But," he 
continued, " we feel an entirely different responsibility as 
to these two courses. If a graduate of our engineering 
school should build a bridge which fell down, we would 
consider it a reflection upon the whole institution. But 
if a graduate of the college makes shipwreck of his life, 
we feel no particular disgrace, for we measure our re- 
sponsibility in this latter case by an entirely different 
standard." 

We must not confuse modern standardization of 
methods, and systems and administrative details, with 
the equally modern theory and practice of interchange- 
able mechanical parts. They are not upon the same 
plane, although they have accomplished somewhat simi- 
lar results. We do need a standardization of educational 
methods, leading to an increased production of thinkers, 
scholars and all-around citizens, but we do not need, 
and in fact should carefully avoid, the production of 
machine-made holders of college diplomas, all, so far 
as the world can judge, of the D or sixty per cent 
standard. 

Standardization of methods and systems leads to true 
economy and to constant improvement in results and 
products, which can then be surely judged and com- 
pared. A great improvement in this respect can easily 
be brought about in the colleges. 

The Carnegie Library gifts have shown what muni- 
cipalities will do to obtain certain benefits, and the Car- 



Standardization and Uniformity 295 

negie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has 
shown how far the colleges will go in giving up denom- 
inational connections and in improvement in teaching 
standards so as to come within its provisions. So if 
certain standardized rules were set for the colleges, and 
some governmental or other outside aid granted to those 
colleges which would submit and conform to such stand- 
ards and tests, it would be found that the institutions 
would accept the aid upon these conditions as gladly 
and universally as the municipalities and colleges have 
in the other instances. A little pecuniary help given in 
this manner would go a great way toward bringing 
about speedy and substantial reforms in our colleges, 
and it is to be feared that nothing else will. For years 
much has been written about the differences between 
the colleges and universities and the duties and func- 
tions of each, but very little has been accomplished in 
the way of constructive work. On the other hand, the 
Carnegie Foundation, with its many millions of endow- 
ment, has already accomplished wonders in directing at- 
tention to the internal disorganization and failures of 
the colleges, and at a merely nominal expense. This 
demonstrates how far a comparatively small amount of 
money will go toward improving college conditions when 
it is applied in a businesslike way from a central agency. 
It also demonstrates that the mistakes of the colleges 
have been those of the head rather than of the heart; or 
of a mistaken rather than of a true idealism. 

The indirect benefits derived by the state, in im- 
proved citizenship and ideals and in the true economy 
which standardization would work in the educational 



296 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

outlays and administration of its higher and lower in- 
stitutions, would more than compensate for the small 
additional annual outlay which would be necessitated. 
The state universities, covering more than one half of the 
total student body, would adopt improved methods as a 
matter of course. So would the older and richer private 
colleges and universities which comprehend probably 
another thirty per cent. The shoe would pinch, if at 
all, with the smaller and poorer colleges, which would in 
fact be benefited by improved administrative methods, 
but which are so small in membership as to make their 
administrative problems very simple. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

SOME FINAL SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE ADMINISTRATIVE 
DEPARTMENT 

The head of the college administrative department — 
who will not be the college president — must be as wise 
as a serpent, as gentle as a dove, but as firm as a rock 
in standing for what is unquestionably right and desir- 
able for the larger weal. He will have as much advice 
about the right course to be pursued as did President 
Lincoln about the conduct of the war, and often it will 
be about as valuable; but it must be received and con- 
sidered with Lincoln's feeling that, while the war was 
raging, his administration and the country had enough 
avowed enemies, and must be ultracareful not to alien- 
ate its friends, even if they were misguided and officious. 

The new administrative chief must often go forward 
by indirection, and be ready to compromise on unes- 
sential in order to gain his larger ends. He must 
adopt as one of his mottoes " jesiina lenie,^* and inspect 
his ground carefully before taking too firm a stand. In 
the beginning he will be largely in terra incognita, and 
be arrayed against a conservatism which will some- 
times appear to be pig-headed. But such has been the 
rule in college progress, which often has been not 
through, but rather notwithstanding, many of the older 
professors who were too old to learn new tricks. 

297 



298 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

This new administrative department will not be a 
place for boys, but will require our very best and most 
robust men, with plenty of good red blood, yet with that 
genial personality which can disarm criticism with a 
smile; and with the true diplomat's ability to refuse a 
favor and leave no sting, but rather the feeling that the 
asker has been placed under personal obligation not- 
withstanding the refusal. The head of this depart- 
ment must also be broad-minded enough to keep his own 
personality in the background, and give much of the 
credit for his own good management to the men who 
are simply the instruments through whom he works; 
while he himself is content with the satisfaction which 
comes from the attainment of the great ends which he 
has in view. He must have unfailing enthusiasm and 
faith in the value of his work and department, and be 
able to impart that enthusiasm to others in the college. 
In the words of an experienced college president : 

"Over both instructors and students there must be ad- 
ministrators who are large minded, resourceful, good judges 
of men, swift to discern weakness — but neither captious 
nor hypercritical — industrious and truly and lawfully am- 
bitious." 

The head of this department will constantly be en- 
deavoring to find and train eligible candidates for carry- 
ing on college administrative work, and be proud of the 
number of good men whom he can inspire to follow in 
his footsteps. For this department, with its diverse and 
intricate duties and functions, will probably require ten 
times as many men as are now thought necessary in our 
present apologies for administration. Soon we shall 



The Separate Administrative Department 299 

come to feel, as does the business man, that not a cent is 
wasted which is spent to improve administrative con- 
ditions, and thus the net working efficiency of every man 
connected with the institution. Here also will be found 
an opportunity to employ in subsidiary positions some 
bright undergraduates who wish to earn their own living. 

Here let us candidly consider the objections wiiich 
naturally arise in the minds of thoughtful instructors 
who know that things are awry, but hesitate to adopt any 
specific remedy lest thereby the evils be aggravated, 
palliated or transferred to some other location in the 
general scheme of education. 

A progressive dean of a Western university writes: 

"Two general criticisms to your plans keep coming up in 
my mind. There is among teachers an innate fear of being 
ruled by red tape. Emphasis is laid generally on sponta- 
neity, on freedom from restraint which permits men to follow 
their natural lines. How can you convince the pedagogic 
arm of the service that the newly created administrative 
branch will not put into force rules which will encroach 
upon the rights of the teachers — they would say, upon their 
power to carry on work so as to develop satisfactorily their 
students? Now please understand this does not appear to 
me a serious argument, but, in talking the problem over with 
colleagues, they feel a great hidden danger in the growth of 
a power which may make them cogs of a wheel. I find 
they regard the administrative machinery of our great cor- 
porations as fetters rather than tools, and it is difficult to 
make them view the matter in any other light. In the next 
place, the amount of money involved is, for any Western 
institution, relatively enormous. The mere statement of this 
amount will cause the question to be decided adversely at 
once. There must be, I fear, a suggestion of a line of grad- 
ual change which shall in time, as the results are seen and 
appreciated, lead to the full adoption of your plan. In fact 
is it not true that evolution is always a gradual process? 



300 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

Even the advocates of mutation hold that such sudden 
changes do not work a very radical alteration in first instance. 
How can you plan for gradual systematization of the ad- 
ministrative element?" 

I have fully shown elsewhere that true administration 
is a helpful tool and not an expensive clog, and that in 
the reorganized college it will relieve the instructor from 
outside drudgery and insure good pedagogical results. 
The application of new administrative methods may 
or may not be gradual. Their formulation should be 
complete from the beginning, leaving the development 
of the complete plan to a more or less distant future. 
The inherent distinction between modern college peda- 
gogy and administration must be firmly grasped : its ap- 
plication in all its details may occupy much time and 
meet with many obstacles. But we can see from the 
above letter why, from the nature of the case, college 
administration, as an adjunct to and under the control 
of the pedagogical branch, is sure to be a comparative 
failure in a large institution. 

Let us suppose, for example, that the faculty has loo 
members, instructing about i ,000 undergraduates. We 
have already gotten some notion of the importance of the 
administrative problems which are involved if such an 
institution is to perform its whole duty to the common- 
wealth, and to all the other interests which have a right 
to expect the college to do its full duty, and especially 
in view of present transitoriness and uncertainty of all 
college conditions. Suppose, further, that a few indi- 
vidual professors, eminently fitted for their pedagogical 
duties, are delegated to institute and supervise adminis- 



The Separate Administrative Department 301 

trative reforms. Admittedly, they are not experts in 
this science in its modern sense, and moreover any time 
taken by the delegated teachers for administration must 
be diverted from their time as instructors and their 
pedagogical results be correspondingly lessened. Hence 
the reforms cannot be complete unless these professors 
give up much of their time to enforcing what they have 
proposed. But true and radical reform always pinches 
at some point. In the present instance the reformers 
are colleagues, fellow-instructors presuming to dictate 
to their equals and fellows how the latter shall conduct 
their own work and courses. Almost inevitably jeal- 
ousy and dissatisfaction arise in the minds of the col- 
leagues as to the methods and even as to the manners 
and motives of the reformers. It is a case of the 
prophet not without honor. The members of the 
faculty are usually of equal rank, and many are avowedly 
opposed to any interference with their rights or courses. 
So long as the administration is under the control of a 
faculty in which such an element has a considerable 
voice, it must be evident that the administration must 
be anything but up-to-date and efficient. 

The notion of pedagogical control of college adminis- 
tration is repugnant to all modern business methods 
and, in the eyes of trained business administrators, 
doomed to failure. It is precisely at this point that a 
great conflict is being waged between capital and the 
trades unions. The latter insist that the foremen and 
superintendents, who are part of the administrative ma- 
chinery, shall be amenable to the men, the producers. 
The employers insist that these administrative agencies 



302 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

shall be under the full control of the concern, and that 
otherwise there will be poor productive results. In this 
regard the advocates of pedagogic control of the college 
administration are ranged on the side of the trades 
unions and not on that of true business principles. They 
would have the administration controlled by the pro- 
ducers and not by the college. Such a system might 
have been expected to fail disastrously, and certainly 
there has been no disappointment in this regard ! 

We have seen that the pedagogical department repre- 
sents, in one sense, but ten per cent of the student's time, 
and that it is but one of the great factors which help the 
student to find himself and make his college education a 
training for future citizenship. Therefore it is easy to 
see that, primarily, college administration should repre- 
sent the institution, and be its right hand in performing 
its great duties, rather than be an adjunct to one de- 
partment of the institution, even though that be the de- 
partment of production or instruction. We must not 
put the cart before the horse. The chief question is not 
whether the pedagogical department requires better ad- 
ministration, but rather whether the commonwealth, 
the parents, the students and all others interested in the 
college do not and should not demand far better results 
in citizen training from the college, and whether this 
huge, rich and complex public servant can do its full 
duty without the aid of a separate administrative de- 
partment. In considering this subject we constantly 
need to stop and think whether we have not drifted 
back to our old standpoint of the college or some par- 
ticular element of it, instead of keeping our eye fixed 



The Separate Administrative Department 303 

upon the rights of the commonwealth and the duty of 
the pubhc servant — which comprehend every lower end. 

So much for answer to the first objection just quoted ; 
and now as to the question of expense. 

This department in its new guise will pay for itself 
and not cost the funds of the private college a dollar. 
For, if it is wise, it will lay its problems before the great 
captains of industry among the alumni and friends of 
the private college, and work hand and glove with them 
over questions in which they are past masters. The 
department should become their hobby, which they will 
be eager to conduct at their own expense, but for the 
lasting good of the institution. The few tens of thou- 
sands of dollars which Alma Mater needs for an up-to- 
date business management will seem a mere bagatelle 
beside the sums which many of these captains of in- 
dustry spend on that department of their own concerns. 
Their cordial cooperation and the benefit of their experi- 
ence cannot be bought, but, if sought in the right way, 
can be had for nothing, and with the privilege to them 
to foot the bills. They will add for good measure the 
services of some of their best accountants and other 
skilled assistants, for they have been accustomed to make 
a marked success and a work of art and science of any 
administrative reform which they undertook, and they 
will not spare time, thought or money to do the same for 
Alma Mater. Surely they will not be willing to score 
their first failure under the eyes of their fellow-alumni. 
Quite probably they were football captains or leaders in 
other intercollegiate contests. As such they will delight 
to take another championship from some old-time rival, 



304 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

by developing an administrative department which can- 
not be surpassed in the great intercollegiate contest as 
to which institution shall most intelligently and thor- 
oughly do its duty toward the state and in giving its 
undergraduates an ideal training for citizenship. Such 
leaders understood mass plays in college; and now, as 
trained business men, they know that the good admin- 
istrator, by caring for the individuals in the mass, can 
get such results from the mass as could not be obtained 
if the mass was not individualized. 

In the state universities the additional cost of the 
administrative department will be gladly assumed and 
provided for by the legislature. The value of the in- 
novation will be clearly seen, and the states have not 
often been niggardly toward any true reform in their 
institutions of higher learning. If the separate admin- 
istrative department is a success in one or more large 
privately endowed colleges, the states will gladly adopt 
and pay for so evident a means of enabling the common- 
wealth to get its money's worth, in efficient citizenship, 
out of its enormous annual outlays. 

One great source of revenue for this new department 
will be found among the parents. Many of them will 
gladly contribute from year to year toward giving the 
college a splendid department which shall individualize 
their sons and restore individual training. A wise ad- 
ministrative head will make certain that he individual- 
izes, not only the undergraduate, but also his parents; 
and thus he will make certain that the parents will not 
allow the college to drift back into its present state of 
inefficiency for the lack of a few scores of thousands of 



The Separate Administrative Department 305 

dollars annually. If a college and its friends can sup- 
port intercollegiate athletics, certainly there will be no 
difficulty in maintaining an up-to-date administrative 
department and its coach and trainers. At least let the 
college attempt it. 

With the cleaning up of the college community and 
home lives, the average undergraduate will get far bet- 
ter results at seventy-five per cent of the present cost to 
his parents. Why should not the college get the benefit 
of the money which it thus saves ? 

But the new department will not only pay for itself, 
but it will get large additions to the college funds; for it 
can present the business needs of the college to the 
parents and business alumni in the terms and forms to 
which they are accustomed in their own affairs. It will 
no longer be the president's chief duty to pass the hat; 
for the parents and business alumni, with the college 
balance sheet and the expert advice of an up-to-date 
administrative department before them, will in some 
things be better able to judge of what the college needs 
than the president himself, and probably they will feel 
like doing things more thoroughly and on a more liberal 
scale than any instructor would dare to propose. 

The colleges should be more like banking institutions, 
with plenty of liquid capital. Instead of this it has too 
often seemed to be their aim to sink as much as possible 
of their money in buildings, instead of keeping it in 
interest-bearing funds wherewith to hire brains. The 
banks which have a hard time in periods of panic are 
frequently those which have tied up large portions of 
their capital in fine piles of brick and mortar. These 



3o6 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

buildings may bring a fair return upon the capital in- 
vested in them, but that is not a proper use of the bank's 
capital. Rather it should be applied in supplying com- 
mercial and banking wants, which are quite distinct 
from real-estate investments. 

A college needs just sufficient buildings to house its 
members and their departments, and these should be 
built upon a well-defined plan of the highest aesthetic 
and utilitarian value. But the chief part of the institu- 
tion's capital, that is, its funds, should be invested in 
men; not necessarily more men, but better men and 
better-paid men, working always at better and better 
advantage, and with bettering results, and held to a 
stricter accountability for better results. Let us then re- 
verse our notion that Alma Mater needs more or finer 
buildings, or that she must have new buildings to rival 
those of some competitor. Let us grudge money for 
such purposes and lavish it on brains; not necessarily 
teaching brains, but also the brains which will make 
good administrative and student life departments. At 
any rate let us give the benefit of the doubt to keeping 
our college assets in liquid form. In at least one leading 
university it is proposed, after finishing the buildings 
now under construction, to undertake no further con- 
struction for several years, but to devote all efforts to 
increasing the salaries of the teaching force. 

Nor should we be so anxious to get huge endowments. 
Let us cultivate the sources from which we can get a 
large annual income through small annual subscrip- 
tions. If we have this source of income we will soon get 
the endowment; but the reverse is not necessarily true. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

THE RELATION OF ADMINISTRATION TO THE STUDENT 
LIFE IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

The reorganized college will recognize that the stu- 
dent life and administrative departments are separate 
from, yet coordinate with, each other, and that both are 
subordinate to the good name and work of the institu- 
tion itself; that is, to its duty as a quasi state and as a 
public corporation. In other words, they are but means 
to the greater whole, which in itself is primarily only a 
means to achieve the lasting good of its individual stu- 
dents. But these departments run so closely parallel to 
each other, and touch and overlap at so many points, 
that it is difficult not to treat them together. Yet it is 
necessary that their essential differences should first be 
clearly defined in our minds, for then we can safely 
think of the points where they come together, without 
the danger of overlooking equally important points 
where they are not in the same life plane, and so cannot 
touch each other. For these reasons these departments 
have been treated in different parts of this book, but we 
must now consider how the administrative department 
must make sure that the student life works out its own 
problems. 

As no two homes in a college are exactly alike, so no 
two colleges are governed by precisely the same local 
and internal conditions, and each must be reorganized 

307 



3o8 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

by those responsible for it, and not by interference from 
without. Hence we can lay down here only general 
rules which have a wide application. 

Let us clearly realize that each college home and each 
college is to a certain extent a law unto itself, especially 
to one who is not or has not been a member therein. 
The unsolicited interference of an outsider is resented 
and justly so, for it implies that the home or college is 
not capable of managing its own affairs. However self- 
assertive and self-confident we may be in regard to our 
own home or college, our attitude must change when 
we come to the portals of another's home or college, 
wherein, from the nature of the case, we must be aliens 
and strangers. We may lay down general principles, but 
the application of these must be left to those who com- 
pose the home and college or control their affairs. The 
final blame or praise must rest upon them — ^for they, 
each and every one, are stewards, and will be held ul- 
timately to a strict account for their stewardship. 

The first step in improving the conditions of the col- 
lege community life and the college homes must be in a 
realization that these are complementary and intimately 
connected, yet governed by differing rules and laws; 
just as our community or business lives are the comple- 
ments of our private lives, intimately associated and 
constantly crossing each other, yet governed by rules 
which in many ways differ widely. Hence every influ- 
ence which adversely or favorably affects either of these 
counterparts must affect the other; and this must never 
be forgotten in regard to the general student life and the 
college family life, 



Administration and the Student Life 309 

Let us next remember that the student's life should not 
be all work nor all play. There is a distinct place in it 
for the play; the undefined something, quite outside of 
the curriculum, which makes it a joy to look back upon 
our college days, yet which ever after makes us better 
able to live for and with our fellow-men. The ninety 
per cent of the student life is the modern successor of 
the earlier college as a school of manners, and we must 
not overlook that which has always been so important 
an element in the character of the alumnus. This is the 
period of life when the young human animal is full of 
vigor and hope and fun, and we must give these an 
abundant and natural vent, or there will surely be moral 
degeneration. There must be the fullest opportunity 
for strenuous, manly, even rough sports, and for the 
gentler things. We must breed neither namby-pamby 
students nor boors, but strong, able, cultivated, polished 
men and thinkers, who are thus fitted to make the most 
out of their splendid manhood. 

We can never hope to lay down precise rules for 
either the general student life or the college homes. 
What is wrong for one man may seem right and proper 
to another. What will shock one may not offend an- 
other. Many, many things are matters of habit, or 
bringing up, or inclination, and very few are so unmis- 
takably and essentially morally right or wrong as to 
warrant us in interfering in our neighbor's affairs, and 
especially in his home. If the college home atmos- 
phere is fine, there will be no reason why the under- 
graduates should not be occasionally kiddish and foolish 
and obstreperous, just like most of their predecessors — 



310 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

so long as they do nothing vicious or which unfits them 
for future citizenship. 

But the college can and should be active in keeping 
the general student life as clean and inspiring as pos- 
sible. This is the straight edge against which it ought 
to constantly test all its rules and regulations. If the 
general college atmosphere is clean and right, and if so 
far as possible only clean men are admitted, we may be 
sure that not many students will go radically wrong. 
Most of all, we must not forget for a moment that college 
is the place for the young man to find himself; that is, 
to try his new strength and his new freedom, and to 
make the mistakes and have the falls which are incident 
to this life period. These mistakes and falls should be 
among his friends and in his college home, that he may 
be made more strong for the more terrible temptations 
of later life. This portion of the boy's growth is passed 
partly on the plane of his college community life and 
partly in his college home; and assuredly is as important 
as a D or sixty per cent diploma. 

The administrative department will keep its eye con- 
stantly fixed upon the training of citizens and thinkers, 
and upon the things which each individual undergradu- 
ate needs to round out his character, mentally, morally 
and physically. For one thing the administrative de- 
partment will msist upon compulsory gymnastics and 
frequent physical examinations, as likely to do away 
with certain forms of moral evil. It will also start 
model college homes for nonfraternity members, which 
they will exclusively occupy or in which they will have a 
preference; or in some other manner will provide for 



Administration and the Student Life 311 

rounding out the social side of the nonffaternity men. 
It will surely individualize every undergraduate so far 
as relates to his college community and home life quite 
as much as it does in relation to his lessons and marks. 

The college has certain rights in every college home; 
assuredly the right to insist that no harmful influence 
therein shall adversely affect the forward progress of any 
student, mentally or morally. If it persistently fails in 
this respect any home may and should be suppressed by 
the college for the general good. But an adequate and 
able administrative department will be in such close and 
sympathetic touch with the dominant influences in its 
college homes that it will both use and help them in im- 
proving home conditions, and thus the general college 
good. All its aims will be toward good quality of work 
— not for mere quantity. The students will study for 
training, not for marks or a diploma in their present 
meaning. 

We shall hold our fraternities more and more closely 
to a higher responsibility for the kind of men that they 
take into their homes, and even more for the kind that 
they graduate therefrom. Their members must stand 
for good scholarship as well as for eminence in ath- 
letics and social functions. We shall use this great 
home-building and home-making force along well-de- 
fined and well-thought-out lines, worthy of the limitless 
amount of graduate and undergraduate energy which is 
stored therein. The fraternities, as they realize their 
great place in the college lives of their undergraduate 
members, will surely rise to higher and higher places, 
and set the example for the college home which the col- 



312 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

lege itself must foster for its nonfraternity members. 
It ought never to be necessary for the administrative 
department to post a fraternity chapter as vicious and 
as forbidden to receive new members until its moral and 
educational conditions shall have been improved. But 
undoubtedly the college has this right, and should use 
it — ^with extreme caution — if necessary to enable the in- 
stitution to do its great duty to the state in regard to the 
citizens of that particular fraternity home. But the 
mere threat of such heroic measures, given to the general 
officers of the chapter or fraternity, would probably be 
sufficient to accomplish a wholesome reform. 

An ennobling student life and clean home lives will 
not be a matter of college law or ordinance, but of an 
enlightened public sentiment carefully fostered by the 
conjoint interest of the institution and its homes, and 
growing better by its own innate strength ; and the col- 
lege's forces for this end will be marshalled by an intelli- 
gent but separate administrative department or bureau. 

These are no fanciful dreams of a theorist. They 
have been realized many times in many places under 
widely varying conditions in our colleges, but much 
more extensively in modern business concerns with far 
more difficult problems and under less favorable cir- 
cumstances than confront the colleges. Under the 
ideals which will ultimately prevail in our reorganized 
institutions, conditions like those now prevailing in the 
student life and college homes of some institutions will 
be unthinkable and abhorrent to all right-minded men, 
for these will be banded firmly together to improve the 
soil into which the good seed is to fall. 



CHAPTER XXX 

THE PRESIDENT IN THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

When, in the growth of a great business, the admin- 
istration has developed into a department and system, 
the crowning personality of the concern must be further 
evolved into an executive head. This executive is no 
longer necessarily the master workman who is thor- 
oughly acquainted, technically and otherwise, with 
every detail of the business and able to step into any 
breach. He must deal, at second hand, through skilled 
technical assistants, with things about which he per- 
sonally can know little, either technically or actually. 
He knows the object v/hich he has in view, but frequent- 
ly would be quite unfitted to work it out unaided. He 
is over all the departments, not at the head of any one. 
He is as much the executive head of the manufacturing 
or other productive department as of the administrative. 
It is unfortunate that in this country we confuse the 
meaning of the words "executive" and "administra- 
tive." This confusion arises largely from the loose way 
in which the words are used in connection with our 
government. We speak of its three great departments 
as legislative, judicial and administrative, and forget 
that there is really a fourth, the executive, who, in a 
sense, is exercising functions that are inherently leg- 

313 



314 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

islative, judicial and administrative. His powers to 
make treaties and appointments, to grant pardons, to 
carry out laws in whose making he had a hand, etc., 
are legislative, judicial or administrative in their nature, 
or extra-legislative, extra-judicial or extra-adminis- 
trative, according to the point, historical, judicial or 
political, from which we view them. In a great busi- 
ness concern the executive is quite above and outside of 
the financial, manufacturing, administrative or other 
departments, and, as already stated, he may know very 
little of these departments from a practical or technical 
standpoint. 

In Harvard and Yale and the earlier divinity-school 
colleges, upon whose plans and traditions the older 
American college was founded, the president was neces- 
sarily the distinguished divine who was fitted to be a 
leader in all things connected with the college, and 
deemed capable of getting the best results out of the in- 
stitution for the church and state, and hence for the 
individual students. His work was known of all men, 
and his position was one of highest honor in the colo- 
nies. Our earlier college histories are largely chron- 
icles of the administrations of the several presidents, 
whose names usually head the chapters. But these 
presidents were very seldom promoted from the ranks 
of the faculty. They were strong and scholarly men, 
who had made a success of their work in the world, and 
who brought into the college new life and spirit from 
the world without, and who were unaffected by faculty 
jealousies and dissensions. Indeed it has never been 
the rule to promote from the ranks of the faculty to the 



The President 315 

presidency, but quite the contrary; care being usually 
taken that the new president should be an alumnus of 
the institution, often an unfortunate method of in- 
breeding. Why not, in our reorganized colleges, formu- 
late and apply the former principles, after adapting them 
to modern conditions? 

The president should be the chief executive of the 
whole institution, but not merely the chief of its finan- 
cial, pedagogical, administrative or student life depart- 
ments. These will each be important enough to have 
their own heads and subheads, their courses or their 
bureaus. But the work of the president is over and 
above any of these things. The chief functions of the 
executive of the reorganized college will not be to know 
the financial needs of the institution and the rich men 
without its walls, and to get in money; but rather to 
know the riches of mind and promise and opportunity 
within the walls, and to get results in citizenship and 
training from these mines of wealth. When this is 
truly the case, there will be little need of hurrying 
around for money, for the amount of work attempted 
will be rigidly limited by the available cash; and any 
additional money needed to expand such ideal work 
will be readily forthcoming, especially from that great 
mine of wealth heretofore unworked — the parents of the 
men in college, who are usually able and who should be 
made willing to give each year the sums necessary to 
meet the new administrative problems connected with 
the training for citizenship of their own sons. 

The reorganized college will distinctly, unhesitat- 
ingly — ^nay, gladly — recognize its duties toward the 



3i6 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

state and its higher interests; toward the various pro- 
fessions or businesses into which its graduates are to go; 
toward the famihes from which they come and those 
of which they shall become the qualified heads ; toward 
its undergraduates within its walls; toward its gradu- 
ates as citizens, fathers, and as men who shall make the 
world better because they have lived in it; toward the 
members of the faculty, that they may be not only good 
scholars, but primarily great and inspiring teachers, and 
that they shall not rust out nor become fossilized, but 
shall have the opportunity to grow and to do original 
work, with a chance to lay aside some financial store for 
an honored old age and for their loved ones — ^not as 
objects of charity, but because they have earned and 
have had an annual surplus; toward its own highest 
ends and reputation; toward itself, with an honored 
past of devotion, sacrifice and accomplishment, but with 
even a more glorious future as its own wealth, and its 
opportunities and the demands upon it grow. If this 
be the ideal of the reorganized college — and it is a just, 
fair and accomplishable ideal — then the college must be 
headed by a truly great man, who can keep in touch 
with all these great objectives, and can lay out and carry 
out such a comprehensive plan of a great educational 
institution, and of a college education for the highest 
kind of citizenship ; and not be or be regarded merely as 
a money-getting machine. Backed by his board of 
trustees he must be the chief planner, and be able to get 
others to carry out his policies and to be proud to be 
identified with him. He will not be the chief laborer but 
the great organizer; not the head of an army corps, or 



The President 317 

division or branch of the service, but the general who 
plans and executes the campaign, even if it covers a 
whole country in its details; not the great scholar, or 
financier or administrator, but the preeminent man and 
executive. A well-organized administrative department 
will be one great agency through which he will make his 
influence and spirit felt, but it will be merely an instru- 
ment especially adapted to bring to pass the work of that 
man in that place, under conditions which there sur- 
round him from time to time. Like the chief of the ad- 
ministrative department, the president must fully ap- 
preciate that it must be the skill, hard work and devotion 
of other men, both to himself and to the cause, which 
alone can make complete success possible. His chief 
duty is to plan and direct, and then to inspire his 
coworkers, and especially the undergraduates, to do 
their best to carry through the great work of the 
institution. 

The president then is to be the man who shall bring 
things to pass in the reorganized college. He will not 
necessarily have grown up from the faculty ranks, nor 
even be a graduate of the institution. He will have had 
a large view of and experience with the outside world. 
He will have accomplished something worth while in 
his previous work. The business world to-day is con- 
stantly on the lookout for men of force rather than for 
technical experts, and the college must adopt the same 
plan. In 1907 the three great insurance companies 
of New York City had combined admitted assets of 
$1,415,857,237, or over five times the capital and sur- 
plus of all the clearing-house banks in that city. Yet 



3i8 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

not one of those great companies had a president who 
had started Hfe in any branch of insurance. One was 
an old merchant, another a lawyer, and the third a 
railroad official. At the end of 1907 the seven largest 
banks of New York City had over seventy per cent of 
the total capital and surplus of all the members of the 
Clearing House. Yet only one of these institutions had 
a president who started life in a bank. Many other ex- 
amples might be given of men who have made successful 
heads of businesses in which they were not originally 
educated. The training of a great executive requires a 
wide and varied experience, but most of all it must be 
based upon the ability to move other men and to cause 
them to work out the great plans which are clear to those 
at the head — but which the workers must take largely 
upon faith. Yet we should remember that usually such 
men must be found and made, and are not to be found 
ready-made. 

But there is one lesson which must be learned in the 
reorganized college, and that is that executive responsi- 
bility cannot be divided. The head of a great business 
corporation is at least left free to work out the great 
policies of the concern, subject to the will of his direc- 
tors and stockholders and his own ability to make good. 
In such affairs it is realized that each man, with a per- 
sonality great enough to entitle him to the place of 
executive, must have his own methods, and even his 
own idiosyncrasies, which must be borne with for the 
greater good. The armor of Saul would have been 
worse than useless to David, and he was wise in insist- 
ing that he should be allowed to conduct his battle in 



The President 319 

his own way. If we can find a forceful individual fit 
to be at the head of our reorganized college we must let 
him work out his own problems largely along his own 
lines, freed from the hampering influences of the faculty, 
or trustees or others, except so far as he needs and seeks 
their help, and is able to get their intelligent and en- 
thusiastic cooperation. 

The most successful presidents of the United States 
have been those who have gathered about them in their 
cabinets their greatest compeers and rivals, and who 
have worked through and with these. The successful 
college president will have a cabinet of splendid experts, 
but he will not be at the mercy of a faculty — for his in- 
structors will be attending to their own higher aims, and 
his cabinet will be the men through whom he is in touch 
with every part of his organization, but who are doing 
the work which he could not attend to if he tried. 
No two successful college presidents will do their own 
work or manage their forces in precisely the same way. 
Their personality will be too strong to be run into the 
same mold, but they will all unite to perfect the tools by 
which they themselves shall work, that is, their finan- 
cial, instructional, student life and administrative de- 
partments. Furthermore, they will cordially unite to 
standardize and make uniform the minor things in 
college administration, so that they and their best coad- 
jutors may give their chief attention to more important 
things. 

In the reorganized college the president must keep 
the college true to its duty to the state, and the under- 
graduates true to their education for citizenship, and the 



320 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

faculty will understand this. The college must dis- 
tinctively train its students so that they may become 
great leaders. Diplomas and marks are in the highest 
sense deceptive, except so far as they aid in fitting for the 
true scholarliness and mental training which will make 
it possible for our students to master great subjects in 
their later life, and for the spirit of leadership which 
shall enable them to dominate and lead masses of men, 
and by such combined power work out great results. 
As the university must be a great leader for and in the 
state, so its trustees and officers and undergraduates 
must be in the van, and join with its president in his 
aim to train leaders. And let us carefully watch our 
president lest he shall break down under such a tre- 
mendous load. 

In other words, we must see that our college presi- 
dents are forceful men of affairs and achievements, un- 
der whose benign and stimulating influence the financial, 
pedagogic, administrative and student life departments 
will reach their highest development, and be united intc 
a perfectly working machine upon its administrative 
side, but working for individual training upon its in- 
tellectual side. 

There are many such men already in presidential , 
chairs, but they are hampered by the failure of the col- 
leges to give them a freer rein. These men have worked 
out many of the college problems to the conclusions 
reached herein, and have striven faithfully to realize 
their ideals, but have been too frequently thrown back by 
the antiquated system of faculty management inherited 
from the forefathers, or by the faults or whims of boards 



The President 321 

of trustees, and by the insurmountable obstacles arising 
from failure to analyze the problem of the college as a 
whole, and because of the unwillingness to differentiate 
and coordinate its departments, and let each attend to 
its own work. 



PART IV 
SUMMING UP 



CHAPTER XXXI 

THE MOTTO AND IDEAL OF THE REORGANIZED COLLEGE 

Now that we have analyzed our college conditions, 
and have pointed out some of the weak, and some of 
the unscientific, and some of the vicious spots therein, 
we must take the next step in our reorganization, and 
clearly determine the underlying principles upon which 
it shall proceed, and which shall control it; and, if pos- 
sible, find a motto which shall crystallize these principles 
in our thoughts ; for our criticism has been constructive 
and not destructive. The conditions are so different in 
our 850 institutions that we must find a single guiding 
star to serve for all. It has not been pleasant to pick 
the college economy to pieces. If no lasting good is to 
come from this exhibit, then it would have been better 
not to have made it, but rather to go on in our present 
blissful ignorance and complaisant self-satisfaction with 
the bigness and grossness of our great institutions, re- 
gardless of their influence for good or evil upon the 
state or their own students, and of their building for true 
manhood and citizenship. But if any permanent good 
is to follow this revelation of the great crime of the nine- 
teenth century against the twentieth century, we must 
determine upon some paramount ideal and hew to that 
line. 

325 



326 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

During the past generation the highest single develop- 
ment of the American college has been in football. Upon 
no other one department has so much time, money 
and enthusiasm of students, faculty, alumni and public 
been expended. No other single activity of the college 
has had the benefit of so much scientific study, com- 
parison of results and standardization. The general 
public knows and cares far more about the flying wedge, 
or mass play, or the forward pass, or the onside kick 
than it does about any other educational problem of the 
colleges. The parents of our land spend much time in 
deploring the annual football death list of from ten to 
seventeen men. Yet for every one killed, or even badly 
injured, hundreds of students are annually ruined mor- 
ally and physically by college vices. But the parents 
apparently take more interest in the physical dangers 
of football than in the moral evils which threaten the 
lives and futures of their sons. 

Football, then, is the chief flower and greatest accom- 
plishment of the American college during the last quar- 
ter of the nineteenth century. Let her not repudiate 
her own offspring, for in football principles — or at least 
in some of them — will yet be found Alma Mater's sal- 
vation ! 

The startling growth of football has been no more 
accidental than the equally startling growth of the fra- 
ternity houses. The wave which has swept so com- 
pletely over our land and taken such hold on college 
and public must have some adequate educational reason, 
or else we as a nation must have gone mad. The col- 
lege authorities, looking backward because they had no 



The Motto and Ideal oj the College 327 

adequate administrative department, could not see that 
the former college home life was obsolete and had dis- 
appeared, and therefore folded their hands and did 
nothing — leaving the students with their alumni allies 
to evolve the fraternity home as a new pattern of the 
college home, well adapted to train the student citizens 
of the new form of quasi college state. In like man- 
ner, when the college authorities, looking backward, 
dreamed of fitting present-day students for modern 
affairs by the pedagogical methods of the earliest nar- 
row-minded divinity-school colleges — the students, still 
working with their alumni allies, evolved football, with 
its modern methods, as a new form of education, well 
adapted to teach the student citizens of the quasi college 
state some of the lessons which, under modern condi- 
tions, they must learn, sooner or later, in their business 
or professional lives. Football to-day represents the only 
place in our colleges where modern business methods 
have been, consistently and persistently and for a long 
term of years, extensively applied to college affairs by 
experts thoroughly in earnest and intimately acquainted 
with college conditions.' As, therefore, the colleges dur- 
ing the past twenty-five years have invested more capi- 
tal of time, money and first-class talent in football than 
in any other one thing, they must be careful that this 
capital is put to good use and is not wasted. Let us, 
then, adopt football principles for the basis of our re- 
organization, and perchance some football enthusiasm 
may be introduced into the ordinary affairs of our re- 
organized college. 

1 "Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 237-43. 



328 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

The college has paid heavily enough for its football 
investment, and so it is not larceny or unfair if it appro- 
priates, and uses as the basis of its reorganization, the 
football principle and motto: "Team work, hard work 
and good work." These words unfold to us the true 
secret of football enthusiasm and success, and of college 
lethargy and of the college waste heap. In the early 
days, when a college course was felt to be an inestimable 
blessing, it stood for team work, hard work and good 
work by everyone in the institution. But as time went 
on — ^possibly because it was a period of change and 
possibly also because the college authorities were look- 
ing backward — the college came to stand more and 
more for size, and numbers, and soft culture courses, 
and marks, and diplomas, and a misunderstood student 
life, and a depraved college home life; and less and less 
for team work, hard work and good work, and a com- 
plete training for citizenship and clean manhood. It is 
right here football scored its great victory among the stu- 
dents and with the public; for often the college course, 
with all kinds of handicaps, and with no separate ad- 
ministrative department, was not in the race. Every 
man, woman and child in the country can understand 
the team work, hard work and good work of college 
football, even if they know nothing of the fine points of 
the game, just as they cannot understand the present 
policy of the college, which, in too many cases, has not 
made for team work or hard work or good work. Team 
work, hard work and good work tell and are appreciated 
and admired in a great army, or fleet, or business estab- 
lishment, or in an America's Cup race, or in a football 



The Motto and Ideal of the College 329 

game, or in any walk of life, and they will surely be the 
motto and plan of the reorganized college. 

Every student knows what team work means in foot- 
ball. It signifies a common goal to be reached, after 
months or years of training, by the united efforts of 
many men, playing different positions in different ways, 
along different lines, yet trained for every emergency, 
and with every advantage of trainer, coach, substitutes, 
accessories and audience — in a fair fight, with a worthy 
foe and for a worthy end. Good team work means this 
in every proper relation of life. If team work, hard 
work and good work are possible in college football, 
then surely also in the college itself. Yet in the col- 
lege economy, the great department which could and 
should organize and supervise team work throughout 
the body politic — in its government, among its citizens 
and within its homes — is practically undeveloped and 
unused. There is no administration in our colleges in 
the comprehensive meaning which the word has in our 
great business or manufacturing concerns, or even in our 
football ; or else the college would have adapted its old 
motto to new conditions, and would not have allowed 
its football coach so often to appropriate it to his own 
exclusive use. 

When the administrative department has assumed its 
proper place there must come the cleaning up and up- 
lifting of the college homes through the engendering in 
each of a strong, ennobling, home-making force. Clean, 
uplifting college homes working hand in hand with an 
enthusiastic and farsighted administrative department 
can clear up the general student life, — and nothing else 



330 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

can. But not all of these can be truly successful except 
as the college ideal is raised many, many degrees to the 
higher plane of football and of good business concerns, 
with their motto, constantly lived up to: "Team work, 
hard work and good work." 

Frequently failures in college make great successes in 
life because the college ideals are low, the college family 
life is vicious and the college methods are wrong; while 
all these are changed when the student emerges into a 
clean, sane and uplifting business atmosphere, and his 
whole business life is governed by its rule of "Team 
work, hard work and good work." 



CHAPTER XXXII 

RESUM]^. THE KEYNOTE OF THE REORGANIZED 
COLLEGE 

Let us attempt to sum up our case and make some 
concrete suggestions for the future — even at the risk of 
appearing to repeat; and keeping ever before us, as the 
keynote of the reorganized college, the ideal of a college 
education which enables the lad to find himself and 
gives him a training for citizenship and manhood, 
rather than primarily for either rank, athletics, social 
distinction or the fraternity. 

First. The aims and ideals of the college must be 
high and clearly defined. Its duty to the common- 
wealth and to the higher interests and the better policies 
thereof, as well as to the individuals and families which 
comprise the commonwealth, must be distinctly recog- 
nized and fulfilled. Much is said about what the state 
owes to the college as the capstone of its educational 
system, but there is very little agitation about the mighty 
and complex duties which the college, as its chief edu- 
cational leader, owes to the state. If we can get clearly 
before our minds this paramount duty to the state — z. 
duty of leadership in all that is good, and high, and 
clean and ennobling; a duty to the future, near and far; 
a duty to the family and to the social order; a duty to the 
undergraduates, one and all — we shall have set up 

331 



332 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

our first great standard by which to judge of the real 
progress of our reorganization. Furthermore, we like 
to tell how, in the love of its members, the college should 
be greater than the fraternity, but are we willing to 
admit that in like manner the state should be greater 
than the college in the love and work of the students? 
What we need is more true patriotism for the common- 
wealth and its great interests — along with our patriotism 
for Alma Mater, and football and other intercollegiate 
sports, and for the fraternity or club. Possibly we need 
not love the college and her good any less, but at least 
we must love the state and her good far more. En- 
thusiasm and patriotism for a successful football team 
form a very low and poor base upon which to rear a 
solid and enduring love for true education in the hearts 
of the undergraduates, and yet this is oftentimes the 
side of the college which is most apparent to the public. 

Where in any of our colleges is there a chair which 
attempts to teach the full duties of the college citizen to 
the college state, or of the college state to the common- 
wealth — a great, broad, sane, effective citizenship? Or 
where is there a chair to teach the civic and political 
economy of the college state and of its constituent parts ? 
The college must first realize and live up to its own 
ideal citizenship and leadership before it can teach these 
with power and life. 

Furthermore, we must raise our aims and ideals as to 
education itself in the abstract and concrete. Not as to 
marks, or diplomas, or courses, or endowment, or build- 
ings, or theories or methods, but as to the sound, fruit- 
ful, growing, virile and cultural education of each stu- 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 333 

dent — the educing, the drawing out of the hundred per 
cent of the best which any individual has in him and of 
which he is capable; not alone or chiefly for the four 
years within Alma Mater's walks or homes, but for the 
years to come in the walks of life and in the communi- 
ties and homes affected and reached by him. We can- 
not aim too high as to education itself, but it is easy to 
see how low we have fallen in this regard. We have 
been too apt to confound the Kneipe with the scholar- 
ship of the German university. Too often we have 
been proud to hold a diploma which we knew was un- 
earned by real work and which did not represent true 
education. We have overlooked the fact that a German 
student cares little about the university from which he 
holds his degree, but is proud to proclaim that he 
studied under such and such a great teacher, renowned 
in scholarship. With us it is too much the institution 
from which we have obtained the sheepskin. With the 
Germans it is the teacher and the living truths which he 
appears to typify, since it was he who uncovered and 
disclosed to the world many of these truths. The facts 
which such a man can teach are indeed important, but 
not at all commensurate with the love of learning and 
investigation which he instills as he discloses his own 
methods of work, and thus reveals to his pupil the pov- 
erty of the latter's youthful acquirements and methods. 
Moreover, our aims and ideals must be for an educa- 
tion that is utilitarian in the highest sense, and produc- 
tive of citizenship and manhood before it is for mere 
culture. When an imeducated man has become a 
skilled mechanic in any line, just so far has he become 



334 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

able to judge of the value of and appreciate good work 
in his own or in any other line of work. To that extent 
he is an expert in good work. So, if the undergraduate 
has thoroughly mastered any branch of learning in his 
course, he has a new unit by which to measure the 
scholarship of other men, and his own scholarly prog- 
ress and accomplishments in the future, and vice versa. 
If, in addition, this mastery has been obtained under 
the guidance of a teacher who also is a true, even if not 
a great, scholar, there has been introduced the element 
of true culture, no matter what has been the subject 
pursued. Good work done in any branch of the cur- 
riculum makes it possible to become thoroughly 
grounded in the so-called cultural courses. But time 
spent in "soft culture courses," skimmed through to the 
end that more hours may be given to some of the twenty- 
seven outside activities which embellish the college 
years, does not make for true education or true culture. 
If a student chooses for the most part soft culture 
courses and does as poor work in them as will get him a 
diploma, he will gain neither true culture nor true in- 
tellectual strength. So far as they set up or tolerate 
such standards, the colleges lower the value of their 
academic degrees, and the quality of the education 
which they are giving, and do actual harm, mental and 
moral, to their students. Instead of performing their 
own duty of leadership, and educating for future citi- 
zenship and clean manhood, they have debased the 
ideals of the future citizen instead of ennobling them. 
The man who uses his one talent is far better than he 
who buries or wastes his five talents, and the colleges are 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 335 

often particeps criminis in this waste. The colleges fail 
in their duties so far as they do not turn out men who 
shall use to the uttermost the talents which have been 
committed to them as individuals. We must never let 
this ideal of the reorganized college and its training slip 
away from us in weighing the results upon the indi- 
vidual students of the course of any particular insti- 
tution. 

In the educational aims and ideals of the reorganized 
college, we must never forget that, in the professions 
and sciences and in many forms of business, this is the 
day of infinite detail and labyrinthine particulars to 
which the only clew is a thorough knowledge of the 
great underlying principles. Our education, then, 
must teach our students to ground themselves in prin- 
ciples, and to build the details upon this solid founda- 
tion — and not to think that they can ever master a 
great science or profession by first learning its multi- 
tudinous details or by the soft-culture-course methods 
too prevalent in our colleges. They must be taught how 
to study and what to study, rather than to study for 
a diploma. They must be taught the digging and 
drudgery that is before them in a successful life's work 
and how these must be tackled, rather than be allowed 
to select a soft course out of a mass of electives. A 
successful football tackle, with all that it implies of 
discipline, practice and coaching, and then of quick 
decision and action, is one of the best possible illustra- 
tions of that training in hard and systematic work in 
intellectual matters which the college should force upon 
^every student. If the institution will but make the ob- 



336 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

ject of such work clear to the student, he will be as 
willing to undertake the drudgery in the college as in 
the professional school or in learning how to become 
a successful football player. 

The so-called culture courses had rightfully a large 
place in the education for controversy of the earlier 
times, and their value was plainly evident to the under- 
graduate of that day. At first the written and the 
spoken word were in Latin, as at Harvard's commence- 
ments.' Until comparatively recently, quotations from 
foreign languages or from the English classics or Bible 
were important weapons for the essayist or pamphleteer 
or orator. Hence what is to-day called "culture" was 
then in everyday use and essential to success under 
the prevailing conditions. To-day, we deal more in 
facts and figures and statistics, and our education, our 
college training, should be framed to meet modern con- 
ditions, at least so far as they train the mind of youth 
to battle successfully against the conditions which he, 
and not his ancestors, must meet. The student's years 
are largely wasted if we give him an education which 
is not best adapted to his future needs. 

The educational course of the reorganized college 
will hold clearly before its pupils the higher ideals of 
the best education, and strive to fill their minds with 
this lofty view of education itself; just as and just as 
much as the best professional schools strive to set 
clearly before the embryo professional man the highest 
ethics and ideals of his chosen calling and the lifelong 
work and devotion through which he must attain 

' " Individual Training in Our Colleges," pp. 61, 82-86. 



Resume: The Keynote oj the College 337 

leadership therein. Only by this constant gaze upon 
the best things of the profession can a young man's 
mind be molded to its highest standards, and he be 
made ready to undertake the arduous training which 
success implies. Heretofore our colleges have largely 
failed to hold up great standards of education, and make 
their true meaning and their value in after life clear and 
living before the eyes of their undergraduates. This 
failure has often come because these things were not 
clear in the eyes of the college authorities themselves, 
whose ideals have been on the diploma-marking-system- 
soft-culture-course-electives level and not on the highest 
planes of a true education. 

Slouchy, haphazard, go-as-you-please, laissez jaire, 
are not pleasant words to use about anything; but they 
truly characterize too much of our so-called college edu- 
cation, as it works out, in fact, with too large a propor- 
tion of our students in too many institutions. The 
Briggs Report proves this and the investigations of the 
Carnegie Foundation demonstrate it. 

Unless the aims and ideals of the college itself are to 
be raised many degrees, it will be practically useless to 
attempt to reorganize upon business methods. Men 
will work hard for money or to support a family, but the 
college offers nothing of this kind. If we are to have 
team work, hard work and good work, we must cause 
our undergraduates to thoroughly understand the value 
of mastering a course of study in college, as well as in a 
profession, or a business, or in football or other sport. 
Thus only will they be ready to endure the strenuous 
work necessary to enable them to master the college edu- 



338 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

cation which shall fit them to succeed to the utmost in 
the increasingly hard battle of life. 

This raising of the aims and ideals of our colleges 
must be general and widespread, or else the reorgan- 
ized college will be put at an unfair disadvantage in 
some important particulars. We understand what was 
meant when a well-known college president writes of 
intercollegiate contests : 

"The punctilious execution of whatever rules are agreed 
upon must be the sincere concern of all the colleges nom- 
inally concerned. The college attempting honesty in ath- 
letic sport single-handed fares as does the grocer who sells 
pure sugar when all his competitors sell sand." 

We shall find it hard to keep our aims and ideals high if 
in a neighboring institution education, so called, and the 
obtaining of a diploma are on the old sixty per cent soft- 
culture-course basis. 

Within the college itself, and between it and all its 
neighbors, we must live up to our new motto, "Team 
work, hard work and good work," so far as relates to 
new and higher aims and ideals, and harder and better 
work. 

Second. We shall clearly recognize that our college 
is divided into distinct departments, and that we can 
bring about a successful reorganization only by making 
a sharp cleavage between these departments, which 
shall thereafter be placed in keen but friendly rivalry 
and competition, so that each may hold the other to its 
very best for the common good, as is done in all well- 
organized business concerns. While there must be this 
rivalry, there must not be jealousy or unfairness, and 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 339 

there will not be if the right man is at the head and the 
aims and ideals of the college are high enough. 

But as the college must look above itself to the state 
and the other higher ends outside of itself, so each de- 
partment must look beyond its narrower boundaries to 
the greater whole — the college with its high objects and 
duties. We must penalize every department, and every 
bureau or individual therein, which balks or sulks or 
otherwise gets out of harmony with its or his confreres 
or with the highest aims and ideals of the institution 
itself. Each department in all its parts must adopt and 
conscientiously carry out the new motto: "Team work, 
hard work and good work." And this will be the more 
easily done because each department will clearly recog- 
nize that it is a factor in the new quasi municipal cor- 
poration and public servant, and as such is performing 
a patriotic duty as truly as those who conduct the elec- 
tions or other public affairs of the commonwealth. 
This will become more evident as we now proceed to 
discuss the various departments in detail. 

Third. In many institutions some functions of the 
financial department cannot be much improved upon. 
The funds are well and conservatively invested, the 
securities are safeguarded and annually checked off by 
outsiders, the accounts are intelligently and clearly 
kept and detailed, and complete annual audits and re- 
ports made, published and distributed. The funds are in- 
vested, the accounts are kept, and the audits and reports 
are made by experts. There are still some improve- 
ments which can and will be made as to application and 
distribution of funds, etc., but this department should 



34© The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

be the least troublesome and most easily managed of all. 
Yet there are many college presidents who have in- 
sisted to me that there is a great laxity and want of 
system in the financial affairs of many institutions. If 
so, it is unpardonable; for there are many places, like 
Harvard and Oberlin, whose financial system could be 
easily followed. 

There should be directly connected with the financial 
department of every college an expert accountant who 
is thoroughly versed in factory administration and ac- 
counting. The administrative, business and account- 
ing problems of the college most closely resemble those 
of the factory or other producing industry. They have 
practically no resemblance to those of banking, and 
very little to those of transportation, or ordinary mer- 
chandising or jobbing. Such an accountant should 
supervise all the bookkeeping of every college activity, 
in such a manner as to teach good business methods 
and bookkeeping to all those immediately concerned 
therewith and to the student body as well. Also he 
should see that the financial department is divided 
roughly into three parts: the getting, the investing and 
the use of funds; covering the usual and unusual in- 
come, the investments, and the expenditures of the col- 
lege. Under the last head he should provide not only 
for the usual safeguards of all expenditures, but he 
should also institute a system under which there will be 
introduced as many new units as possible by which to 
judge of the work of all of the various departments, 
courses and individuals within the college, and to pro- 
vide methods by which the exact cost of each depart- 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 341 

ment and course can be safely anticipated and ascer- 
tained — to the end that there shall be provided, first, 
proper reserve funds to cover contingencies in the 
teaching force, and, second, that the best net result 
upon the individual undergraduate shall be obtained 
through limiting the student body, so that each course 
shall do its best possible work upon the right kind and 
right number of students, and within proper financial 
limits. In other words, this accountant must be in 
charge of the factory cost system of the institution, and 
must arrange this so that it shall be an available chart 
for future work, just as is done by the accounting force 
of every modern manufacturing business which covers 
a large volume of business and a large number of men. 
Fourth. The pedagogical or instructional depart- 
ment must be thoroughly reorganized^ not so much as 
to personnel as to methods and ideals. If the teacher 
is to be the new primary unit of the college factory, he 
must be worthy of the place given him, and must be held 
to strict accountability in the high functions which he 
assumes in the quasi state, and must be rewarded and 
regarded accordingly ; and these matters must have con- 
stant and grave consideration. The teacher must thor- 
oughly know his subject, and grow in it, and do original 
work worthy of the state, but also he must be an inspir- 
ing instructor as well as a scholar. He must enthuse his 
pupils and draw them to himself and his subject. He 
must approximate to President Garfield's ideal of a uni- 
versity — himself at one end of a log and Mark Hopkins 
at the other. He must aim to educe the very best that 
is in his hearers, and must make them feel that their 



342 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

education has been perceptibly advanced by their course 
under him. 

We must put a distinct and unmistakable premium 
upon fine teaching capacity, and not kill it off or cripple 
it by unduly or unfairly overworking it, or by asking it 
to do the work of the poor teacher, or by failing to recog- 
nize and reward it. If this premium cannot be ade- 
quately paid in money, then some form of honors and 
recognized scholastic distinction must be devised and 
applied and made known to the public. This is true 
of the German system, and there is no reason why some- 
thing of the same kind should not be attempted here. 

Most of all must there be the best possible system of 
promoting a good scholar and teacher so that his talents 
may have a recognized value, without as well as within 
the institution in which he works. A victorious college 
athlete may earn the right to wear the college letter, and 
often he will work hard for four years before he gets this 
badge of honor. Can it be that there is no just and wise 
method which the college authorities can devise by which 
good teaching work can earn its crown ? Successful col- 
lege athletes are known throughout the land, but what 
are the colleges doing to bring honor and reward to the 
great teachers whose work, after all, is at the foundation 
of college athletics and college life? 

Furthermore, we must clearly appreciate that huge 
faculties contain the same class of dangers to the promis- 
ing and earnest younger members thereof that huge stu- 
dent bodies do to the individual student. There is the 
same danger in each case that the individual will be lost 
in the mass or pocketed in the race ; possibly because he 



Resume: The Keynote 0} the College 343 

has not those unpleasant aggressive and self-assertive 
personal qualities v^hich v^ill push forward a mediocre 
competitor. It should not be necessary for one who has 
in him the stuff for a good teacher to advance his own 
fortunes. There should be a well-organized adminis- 
trative system to recognize and reward such men and 
put them where they can do their most efifective work 
for the commonwealth, the institution and the indi- 
vidual undergraduate. Hence there must be a clear 
perception of the need of picking out and rewarding true 
teaching merit, and we must experiment until we find 
the broadest and most effective means of assuring a 
crown of honor and the largest field of work for the suc- 
cessful and forceful teacher. 

Moreover, the college itself must award its own peda- 
gogical honors in no uncertain fashion if its successful 
instructors are to receive honor from the world at large. 
For years this policy has been followed in college foot- 
ball. Why should not the college in educational matters 
— of which it should surely be the best judge — ^also award 
some of the honors to which its teachers are justly en- 
titled ? If it does not do this, it cannot complain if the 
world does not; nor if, in the eyes of the world, the suc- 
cessful coach or athlete seems far more important to the 
college than the most brilliant scholar and teacher. The 
world is but following the lead of the college itself, whose 
coach is sometimes more widely known than its presi- 
dent, and apparently has more real influence among its 
undergraduates and more lasting influence throughout 
their lives. As a matter of fact, nothing of this kind will 
ever be successful until a separate administrative de- 



344 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

partment introduces criteria by which good work in 
every branch can be picked out, made known and re- 
warded, and the colleges standardize upon these cri- 
teria. 

Let there be something like the same anxiety in the 
college itself for the health and effectiveness of a star 
teacher that there is for that of a star athlete. The 
newspapers devote columns to discussing whether a fa- 
mous quarterback or other member of a team will be 
in condition to play in or throughout a certain game; 
yet half of the faculty might be invalided and out of ser- 
vice, and hardly a line would appear in any journal. 
The college itself — ^not by rules but by student, alumni 
and faculty public sentiment — ^must reverse this order 
of things, whereby in appearance, if not in fact, ath- 
letic renown is the chief end of the institution and edu- 
cation the incident. 

If the successful teachers are to have a commen- 
surate honor and reward, it must be because student 
and alumni sentiment understands and values good edu- 
cational work, and gives it that chief place of honor due 
to it in an institution of higher learning, and because 
there is some recognized and standardized test by which 
good pedagogical work can be judged even in another 
institution. 

Every important profession has had to assert itself, 
and work out its own salvation and its right to honor- 
able and rewarding distinction. Theology, law, medi- 
cine, dentistry, engineering and other professions have 
thus, from time to time, fought their own battles for 
recognition and honor. College pedagogy must follow 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 345 

the same course, or remain where it is and subject to 
about the present or worse conditions. There are but 
two courses open to it if it would better its position. It 
must actually and in good faith raise its own standards 
and performance, and then insist upon and obtain a fair 
recognition upon its merits, or else it must organize 
upon the basis of a trades union and institute a country- 
wide strike. 

As a matter of fact, our college instructors could 
learn some important lessons from a labor union like 
that which governs our locomotive engineers. For one 
thing, they could learn to assert the right to have a 
controlling voice in the pedagogical policy of the in- 
stitution, and to be content to let the other depart- 
ments manage their own affairs. Admittedly, at first 
this must have some wise limitations, but the dangers 
of faculty control of the curriculum and of pedagogical 
affairs will be minimized when administration and dis- 
cipline are placed in the hands of a separate and co- 
ordinate department. Again and again I repeat it as 
my candid opinion that the salvation of the faculty lies 
in a separate and splendid administrative department, 
earnestly determined to get the best possible educa- 
tional results. The faculty should demand such a de- 
partment, and demand that it work for them, to make 
their work more productive and their results more sure 
and rewarding. I am firmly convinced that until such. 
a department has begun to make itself felt, the faculty 
as such can never take their proper places in the college 
or the outside world. To me this seems perfectly self- 
evident. This opinion has been acquiesced in by every 



346 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

man of affairs to whom I have submitted the facts. 
College presidents and executives agree. But many of 
my friends among the instructors stand aghast at intro- 
ducing anything like business into their departments. 
They look upon administration as an enemy instead of 
an ally; a clog instead of a clarifier. 

Above all this, the instructors must learn and con- 
scientiously practice the new motto, " Team work, hard 
work and good work" — ^but especially they must learn 
true team work. To that end they must realize that 
their power for evil is quite as great as their power for 
good within the college economy. Hence the instruct- 
ors must cordially welcome the new and separate de- 
partment of administration, and do all in their power to 
make it a success in the highest sense and for the highest 
ends of the college. There must be no lukewarm and 
grudging acquiescence in the new state of affairs, no 
anxiety to pick flaws, but rather a hearty and heartfelt 
sympathy with a difficult problem which is for the com- 
mon good. Moreover, as a matter of financial and 
other economy and efficiency, the teachers must give 
active as well as negative help in the field of adminis- 
tration. The problems of the latter are largely those 
which concern the former. Administration is neither 
the servant nor the master of college pedagogy, but 
rather its enthusiastic and trained friend and colaborer, 
striving to work out the highest aims and ideals of this 
new quasi state; by joint action, to get, in the intricacy 
of modern conditions, the same quality of results which 
the instructor working alone could accomplish under 
the simpler conditions of earlier times. 



Resume: The Keynote oj the College 347 

And here let me repeat the expression of my deepest 
respect and regard for the teaching forces of our col- 
leges. There is no other body of our citizens whose 
lives are more devoted and unselfish, or whose work is 
harder, or whose reward seems relatively more inade- 
quate. I have sought to make my words, not hard, but 
plain; not to impugn motives, but methods. I would 
not add an ounce to your burdens, but rather lessen 
some, and show you new and modern devices for shift- 
ing and easing others. Your alumni cannot do your 
work for you and should not attempt to, but they can 
and will gladly show you new methods of meeting 
modern conditions and of making your labors more 
pleasant, efficient and rewarding. But you must decide 
whether you will adopt such methods. You are the 
arbiters of your own fate. We can suggest, but ulti- 
mately you must decide the result. You must be will- 
ing to forego some things to gain greater ends. You 
have been individualistic. You must learn to be co- 
operative. You must cordially, nay, eagerly, adopt and 
steadfastly carry out the modern world's great motto, 
"Team work, hard work and good work"; with the 
emphasis so far as you are concerned, let me say again, 
upon the team work; and this means team work with 
your associates in your own course, and in the faculty 
and in every other department of the college. 

Fijth. The student life department must next be 
considered under its twofold nature, the college com- 
munity life and the college home life, corresponding so 
closely to the business and home life of the ordinary 
citizen ; but modified somewhat by the fact that our col- 



348 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

lege citizens are not yet breadwinners, but are still more 
or less directly accountable to their parents who sup- 
port them. 

The reorganized college must first of all realize that 
it is dealing with men — the picked young men of the 
country — for whom it is responsible first of all to the 
country itself. They must be treated as men, and made 
to bear the burdens and responsibilities fitted to their 
strength, and suited to give them the same kind of dis- 
cipline which many of their friends and contemporaries 
are obtaining in good business houses. At twenty to 
twenty-two, such picked men in ordinary business life 
would be bearing very weighty responsibilities, and bear- 
ing them well among men who were many years their 
seniors in years and experience. More and more the 
direct burden of the student government and public 
sentiment of the college and the care of its homes should 
be put upon the undergraduates, and in such a manner 
as to interest them in and prepare them for similar 
problems in their future lives. The investigation and 
care of its student life will be one great branch of college 
work, for on this ninety per cent of the undergraduate's 
time largely depend the results of the ten per cent passed 
in the presence of his teachers. 

The bounds limiting the college community and 
home lives will be clearly outlined and made known, 
and college justice will be administered by a student's 
peers. Why not recognize that there will be politics in 
every college, and teach our young men to play them on 
as clean, educational and helpful a scale as possible? 
Under no circumstances let us leave the discipline of the 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 349 

individual to be voted upon by the body of the faculty. 
The final word should be with the president, or with 
some very small group that is in the closest touch and 
sympathy with the student body and the college homes. 
The college ideal should be to anticipate and prevent 
the need of discipline rather than to seek an opportunity 
to administer it. The college should follow the course 
of modern medicine which drains swamps and uses pre- 
ventives; or of modern business which avoids lawsuits 
by taking counsel beforehand. 

The college will study its own social and political 
problems as carefully as it does its educational, and will 
let the results be known. While it maintains a clean 
student atmosphere, it will remember that a large part 
of the preventive measures must be exerted in the home. 
Here it will avail itself of its natural allies, the parents 
and alumni. 

The fraternity owes it to its members to provide them 
with a good college home. But just as much does the 
college owe it to every student that he shall have a good 
home. In so far as the fraternities furnish truly good 
homes the college is fortunate in being relieved, to that 
extent, of this part of its duty. But its duty still re- 
mains, so far as it relates to the nonfraternity members, 
and must not be shirked. Surely the fraternities can- 
not complain if the college sets up, for its nonfraternity 
members, model homes which will put every fraternity 
on its mettle. The time must soon come when the fra- 
ternities, like the colleges, shall be sternly judged by 
their present-day results, not by their names or history 
or wealth. Let the colleges carefully investigate and 



35° The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

candidly publish the results in later life and other im- 
portant details as related to home life in the fraternity 
houses, the dormitories, town boarding houses or other 
college homes. Such use of the publicity bureau would 
draw attention to the true conditions and lead to im- 
portant reforms. 

Here again let competition be the life of good work. 
Every good fraternity ought to welcome the competi- 
tion of the college in a home-making experiment. If, 
with years of start and with manifold advantages, the 
fraternity home cannot hold its own, it deserves to go 
down. The fraternity may well be voted a failure if in 
the long run it cannot give to its members more than 
they can get in a home conducted by the college. The 
difficulty is that the college has seldom furnished any 
opportunity for such a competition. It has provided 
the barracks accommodation of a dormitory, or rele- 
gated its students to the cold comforts of a student 
boarding house in an overcrowded college town, but it 
has done substantially no home-making except in a few 
of the women's colleges. Let the college set up a 
model home, if it can, and most of its good features will 
be at once adopted by the fraternities, and the whole 
college home problem will be much nearer solution. 
But the college has much to learn from the experience 
of the fraternities and must copy many of the good 
social and home-making features of their homes. A 
college home must not be too large, and should have a 
good commons, and a cozy lounging room, and a good 
floor for dancing, and as many as possible of the things 
that go to make the fraternity houses homes, and not 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 351 

dormitories or barracks. Until the college insures good 
homes to all its students, fraternity and nonfraternity 
alike, it has fallen short of its duty in rounding out the 
domestic and social side of the character of the future 
citizen, and in properly providing for a clean and help- 
ful college home life. 

Admittedly, municipal ownership is advisable in some 
things, such as the water supply. William H. Taft has 
put this thought as follows: 

"Where a general service to the public cannot be well 
discharged by private enterprise, and can be eflfectively and 
economically discharged by the government, the govern- 
ment should undertake it." 

In like manner, it may be advisable for the college to 
attempt the experiment, not so much of home-building 
as of home-making, on a small scale and in competition 
with the fraternities and the town boarding houses. 
Certainly such an attempt would be an interesting one 
and might have far-reaching results. 

As the institution must assure a right college atmos- 
phere and community life, it must as surely see to it 
that every fraternity or other unofficial college home is 
doing good work for the common good, and in such a 
way as to enable the college to fulfill its duty to the 
state, to education and to all its higher aims and ideals, 
and this duty should be discharged through the home- 
making forces of the home itself. 

The college home has its great functions as truly as 
the home of boyhood or manhood, and that student has 
lost a large part of the charm, educating and polishing 
of his course who has not felt and contributed to the in- 



352 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

fluences of a fine college home life. Right here lies the 
power for good or evil of our college homes. 

Let us, as college men, rise above fraternities or in- 
stitutions, and determine that, as parents, alumni and 
citizens, we will join with all interested in our institu- 
tions of higher learning to set forward the cause of the 
college home life. The Home is greater than any one 
home or series of homes, and the College Home is more 
important than those of any institution or of any fra- 
ternity. 

Let every parent, sending his son to college, study the 
home life therein, and keep in touch with his son's col- 
lege home, and demand of the college that it shall take 
intelligent care of his college community and home life. 

Let us study the college home as a home, first, last 
and all the time, and then we shall be able to improve 
it along sane and effective lines, and give it its proper 
place between that of the father and that of the bread- 
winner; and we shall not be drawn off to side issues. 

Here, too, is another great field for cooperation and 
competition, with a proper credit given to those who do 
good work; for among the college homes, also, the motto 
applies: "Team work, hard work and good work." 

Sixth. As to the separate administrative depart- 
ment, we must remember that administration is an ex- 
pense and a nonproducer; that its principal aim is 
to make effective or available the productive work of 
others; and that it is chiefly designed to surround the 
producing elements with service conditions without 
which, in large concerns, they cannot work to the best 
advantage. 



Resume: The Keynote oj the College 353 

Let us also admit that a separate administrative de- 
partment in our colleges is a necessary evil or adjunct, 
which has become indispensable because of growth in 
numbers and the intricacy which comes with modern 
conditions. Hence this new department must be pro- 
portioned to the size of the institution and the number 
of its departments and courses. A department which 
would be sufficient in a small college would be entirely 
inadequate in a large one; a system that would work 
well in a large university would swamp a small college; 
what would be successful in a private or denominational 
college might utterly fail in a state institution. It re- 
quires genius to adjust an administrative system so that 
it will be neither too large nor too small; so that it shall 
not go into unnecessary minuti^, nor omit to cover im- 
portant details ; so that it shall be neither niggardly nor 
extravagant; and so that, while encouraging and re- 
warding the faithful, it shall detect the laggards. In a 
large sense, administration is a constant readjustment of 
the affairs of others and of its own methods. 

College administration is as yet in an experim^ental 
stage, and must be undertaken conservatively by each 
institution or group of institutions, until we have the rec- 
ords of enough experiments to provide data for gener- 
alization. These records should be upon the same gen- 
eral plan and be collected and collated by experts. 

There are certain things that ought to be thoroughly 
covered by the administrative department in every col- 
lege of, say, 300 or upward. It is a matter of discre- 
tion, depending upon the size and conditions of the 
institution, as to whether these matters shall be put un- 



354 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

der the charge of distinct bureaus, or whether one man 
or bureau shall attend to several branches. For the 
sake of convenience, I shall treat the administrative de- 
partment under the heads of different bureaus, as must 
be done in our largest institutions. These suggestions 
are merely tentative, and in some instances would need 
considerable variations. These are the things which 
should be covered by the new department; the methods 
and forms by which these ends are to be reached are 
susceptible of many changes. A start in the proposed 
system has been made in many institutions, but never 
as a separate department recognized as coordinate and 
coequal with all the others. 

(i) The first bureau we may call that of statistics 
and forms. This should be under a skilled statistician, 
possibly the expert accountant already spoken of, but 
will embrace so many different subjects that it may re- 
quire subdivision. 

It will have charge of and collect and collate the 
statistics upon the following, among other, matters: 

(a) The general system of forms and blanks for use 
throughout the institution, and the particular forms 
necessary in any part of the institution to accomplish 
the general purpose of the college, (b) The prepara- 
tion and supervision of any system of blanks and forms 
required to collect any desired information or statistics, 
(c) The collecting of the general statistics of the college 
and its students, now largely covered by the office of the 
registrar, who should either be placed over this bureau 
or under its head, (d) The collection and collating of 
the results of the class-room work of each course and of 



Resume: The Keynote oj the College 355 

each student and of each class of students, {e) The 
preparation and oversight of a comprehensive mark- 
ing system, and the collating and rendering its results 
readily available so as to furnish data upon the past, 
present and future work of each student. (/) A general 
account of stock of the whole college, taken at least 
yearly, possibly quarterly or monthly, and designed to 
get at the exact facts, whether favorable or unfavorable. 
This should also serve as the general bureau for inter- 
change of information within the college itself, and as 
the official bureau to collaborate with sister institutions. 
(2) The second bureau will be that of the college 
waste heap. Its duty will be carefully to examine and 
rectify the educational or other factors which, before, 
during and after a student's course, tend to produce bad 
work or prevent good work. This will call for a sharp 
analysis of the preparation, mental, moral and physi- 
cal, of those who come from the various preparatory 
schools, and hence of the schools themselves; of the in- 
fluences in the college itself which affect, adversely or 
otherwise, the general cause and course of education 
therein ; of the reasons why individual students have not 
completed their course, and their subsequent history ; of 
the general success in after life of each graduate, and his 
suggestions based upon his own undergraduate experi- 
ence. This, or some other bureau, must collate the re- 
sults of various courses in the college, and advise with 
undergraduates as to their work and courses, and act 
in close touch with a faculty committee on scholarship. 
The waste in the teaching force is put under the seventh 
bureau. 



356 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

(3) A third bureau must be that of college activities, 
which will study and be responsible for the college com- 
munity life and the general student atmosphere; which 
will keep in close touch with the outside activities of the 
college, and their effect upon pedagogical results and 
upon the college community and home life. It must be 
in sympathetic charge of the religious and moral welfare 
of the college as a whole, and must supplement its work 
by committees of the faculty and students. This bu- 
reau must work in the closest way with 

(4) That of the college home life, which must have 
charge, in a large yet intimate way, of the college homes 
and their highest interests, as those relate to their own 
inmates or to the course of education in the college it- 
self. These last two bureaus come partly within the 
province of the college dean, but that should not prevent 
the making of a distinct and wise provision for the bu- 
reaus of college activities and of the college home life. 
Whatever else happens, these two bureaus must be made 
the most of. 

(5) The bureau of health and physical exercises will 
not infringe upon the recognized teams and athletics 
of the college, but will care for the many students who 
are not on any team or under the direction of any 
trainer. It will make sure that every man in college 
has compulsory physical exercise, and graduates with a 
good physique and bodily health, and with a thorough 
knowledge of the kinds of exercise without apparatus 
which he can use in his office or home; that there are 
frequent and complete physical examinations of every 
undergraduate at unexpected times, and proper lectures 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 357 

upon his physical constitution and its care, and upon 
his home duties and responsibilities in after life. This 
bureau will have the power, for instance, to prescribe 
boxing and fencing lessons for those hard students who 
lack physical force, or dancing lessons for those who 
need the social graces; for in such cases aggressiveness 
and self-confidence may be the chief things lacking to 
insure perfect usefulness in after years. This bureau 
will be in close touch with the medical and physical 
directors. 

(6) The sixth bureau, that of the graduate field, will 
seek to follow the alumni and see that they catch on in 
the world and make real progress therein. It will be 
on the lookout for opportunities, and be a clearing 
house for outsiders who are seeking the right college 
man for the right place in after years. It will study 
the curriculum from the light of results, and, through 
lectures from prominent alumni and others, will in- 
fluence the college community life by making the stu- 
dents understand the conditions that will face them 
after college and for which their college course must 
prepare them. Possibly this bureau may best be com- 
bined with the second, for their fields lie close together. 

(7) The seventh bureau, that of the college plant, 
will have a general oversight over the work of the teach- 
ing staff, to make sure that each member is doing his 
best work at the best advantage, that there are no drones, 
and that there is no preventable waste in the college 
machinery. Great care will be taken to develop and 
foster every influence helpful to higher intellectual and 
educational ideals and methods within the faculty, or 



358 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

within its student body, or in the parts of the institution 
common to both faculty and students. If this bureau 
is undertaken in the proper spirit, and is made general 
throughout the colleges, it will be of great advantage to 
the preceptors, associate professors and other younger 
teachers, and to the institutions themselves; for a misfit 
in one college may be made a success in another, or an 
apparent failure may be made to do good work by some 
change of conditions in the same institution, and those 
who do good work will find sure recognition for their 
efforts, and the benumbing effects of the influences which 
now affect the lower-grade teacher will be persistently 
counteracted. This bureau must work in the closest 
touch with the president, and often only through him 
in delicate cases. 

(8) The eighth bureau will be that of publicity, which 
will not, as now, have the tendency to confine its work 
to advertising a successful coach, nor to improving the 
betting odds by sending out misleading reports as to 
the members of the teams or crews. It will insure that 
the educational work of the institution and of its best 
men is made known to the world; that parents and 
alumni are kept in close touch with present conditions, 
and that honor is given where honor is due. 

(9) Lastly there must be the Mark Hopkins or per- 
sonal-equation bureau; though possibly this bureau will 
be embodied in the chief of the department himself, and 
thus thoroughly pervade the whole administration. Its 
motto must be along the line of the saying of the late 
Professor Park, of Andover Theological Seminary, who 
used to tell his students that it was not so important as 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 359 

to how large a college a man had gone through, but 
rather how largely the college had gone through him. 

So far as the administrative department deals with 
administrative machinery, it is important, necessary 
and formative, but, after all, in this respect it is essen- 
tially an added expense. Its great glory and productive 
value will be in preserving and making truly effective 
the personal equation which was so vital an element in 
the training of the earlier college in its narrowness and 
poverty. Character - building and the power of the 
older man and scholar upon the younger man and stu- 
dent are the great things which stand out as we study 
these earlier temples of learning; and these must still 
be the great underlying ideals of our college training 
for citizenship. The college must more and more — 
and ever more — use and insure the use of the personal 
manhood and scholarship of the teacher to engender 
manhood and scholarliness, if not scholarship, in the 
taught. One great professor, every inch a man and 
equally a scholar, and preeminently a fructifying force 
for character and scholarliness, writes: 

"Your system seems to me to threaten over-organization 
and excessive centralization, harmful to teacher and student 
through killing spontaneity. When the college comes to be 
as completely organized as our most successful business cor- 
porations, is there not a risk that it will produce well made, 
accurately adjusted cogs and wheels, etc., for the great so- 
cial machine, rather than men of initiative, possessing in them- 
selves and respecting in others the disposition and power to 
grow each in his own way?" 

If this be so, then is my message a failure. The stu- 
dent who does not carry away from Alma Mater's halls 



360 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

the deep impress upon his innermost Hfe of some one or 
more great men and scholars has indeed missed the 
chief thing in his training for citizenship. Far better 
to leave: college in one year with this impress than to 
leave it at the end of four years with merely a marking- 
system diploma. 

There is much of the machinery of a separate admin- 
istrative department which is of the most machine and 
perfunctory kind — to accomplish machine results. The 
increasing extent of the college plant requires this. But 
the personal equation of the teacher is still the great 
character-building force in the course, whether it be one 
year or four in length, and the college as an institution 
exists that it may gather together the great collection of 
manhood and scholarliness and character-building force 
which is represented in the picked individuals of a good 
faculty. This power for character-building and schol- 
arliness is, after all, the true capital of the college — ^not 
its funds, or its buildings, or its material wealth of any 
kind. All these latter things are as much mere me- 
chanical instruments as is its administrative department 
and machinery. Above all things, the college has no 
right to waste, unnecessarily, a single jot or tittle of its 
character and scholarship building capital. To min- 
imize any loss at this very point and in this very respect 
is the great duty of the personal-equation bureau. The 
loss in this respect is terribly and unnecessarily — ^nay, 
even criminally — great to-day under present college 
methods. Indeed the administrative department must 
have for its paramount aim to keep constantly em- 
ployed, at their utmost eflficiency, every element of the 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 361 

college economy and capital — the funds, the buildings 
and other material plant; the impersonal machinery; 
the student life; most of all the college history and tra- 
ditions, and the college spirit, and the manhood and 
scholarship, individually and collectively, of the faculty. 
Here is where the college course is to guide the footsteps 
of the lad as he prepares to enter the larger life of his 
business or profession. Here is the point where the 
personal-equation bureau can collaborate most efficiently 
and payingly with the waste-heap bureau. 

Again and again we must remember that adminis- 
tration, except for definite uses and ends, is an unneces- 
sary and almost unproductive expense; but the admin- 
istration which gets additional return upon the college 
capital of men and character is not an imnecessary ex- 
pense, but rather a vital necessity if we would avoid a 
terrible waste of the most precious heritage of the in- 
stitution. And I would have this bureau exert itself 
most constantly and forcefully at the very beginning of 
the freshman year. This is the time of highest purpose 
and of least resistance to good moral influences. There 
is no doubt in my mind, from a fairly broad experience 
in college homes, that the average college graduate has 
higher ideals and hopes at the time when he enters col- 
lege than at any other time in his life. He has left home 
and the preparatory school with a feeling that he must 
now show what is in him, and that he is standing alone 
for the first time. In many cases he appreciates the 
serious inconveniences and even sacrifices which the 
loved ones at home are making for him. His ambitions 
are high and his purposes pure. It is at this time that 



362 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

both the college and the fraternity too often offer to him 
a stone. The harm done at this point of his develop- 
ment, when his community life is unfolding, may never 
be undone. But just as surely the good purposes, which 
are then regnant within him, may be solidified into per- 
manent character by the right treatment. It should 
be one of the high duties of the personal-equation bu- 
reau to insure that each undergraduate has the right 
surroundings and help at the critical periods throughout 
his college course — ^but especially at its beginning. 

Over all and throughout all these bureaus, and in- 
spiring them all, will be the chief of the administrative 
department, who will soon come to be regarded as the 
most indispensable man in college, for he will be at the 
service of everyone. But most of all he and his depart- 
ment will be the chief exponents and champions of the 
college motto : " Team work, hard work and good work." 
He will be the master spirit in keeping up enthusiasm 
for higher things. He will be proud of his system, not 
because it is complete, or intricate or scientific, but be- 
cause it does things, and makes the crooked straight 
and the rough places plain, and restores individual 
training in the college. He will be wise enough and 
broad enough and strong enough to vary his system 
when it works badly, to ease it if it bears too harshly at 
any one point and to improve it constantly. This de- 
partment and its head will be the right hand of the 
president, making it possible for him to formulate and 
carry out new and higher policies without the nervous 
wear and tear that must otherwise ensue. 

Seventh. But the president must be a man trained 



Resume: The Keynote oj the College 363 

to avail himself of a scientifically conducted administra- 
tive department. Possibly this may result in our having 
and requiring a scientific business and factory training 
for college presidents ; for the president of the reorgan- 
ized college must be, not only a great man by nature, but 
one especially trained to assume so high a position and 
to safeguard interests that mean so much to the com- 
monwealth and to all within it. It will also be of great 
advantage if he shall have acted for a few years as the 
traveling secretary of a fraternity, and thus have sym- 
pathetically studied, from the undergraduates' stand- 
point, the student life of many institutions. 

Eighth. As there must be a distinct cleavage between 
the various departments of the college, so there must be 
an increasingly distinct differentiation between the college 
and the university or graduate schools, and the statistics 
gathered by our administrative department will enable 
us to work this out more scientifically and satisfactorily. 

Ninth. The functions of the board of control or of 
trustees will be carefully worked out, so that the board 
shall help in a large way, rather than hinder, the best 
possible internal administration of the affairs of the col- 
lege by the several departments which are on the ground 
and directly responsible for results. 

Reorganization will not imply a shifting of old faces, 
but rather a bringing in of new forces and the intro- 
duction of new methods looking toward like, but even 
higher, ends than were formerly possible. The re- 
organizer will be the coach who can show those within 
the institution how to put into effect team work, hard 
work and good work. 



364 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

Tenth. The one subject which now is required of 
every student in every course and every college is English 
To this will be added another — citizenship. If anything, 
this should be considered the more important of the 
two, and should be taught in connection with the actual 
government of the student body and activities. There 
should be a department of citizenship in its largest 
sense, just as there is a department of English. The 
prime object of this course should be to inculcate the 
highest ideals and exercise of citizenship. It should be 
a freshman study, and eventually an entrance require- 
ment also. The college should be governed, as far as 
possible, upon the model of the state, with its upper and 
lower houses for legislation, and its legislative, judiciary 
and financial systems to control student activities. The 
college should not study to see how little of real power 
it can give over to the student government, but how far 
it can perform its duty to the commonwealth by forcing 
these embryo citizens to learn and exercise those civic, 
public and political functions and duties upon which 
the future well-being of the state may at some time or 
place depend. The exercise of the franchise or of stu- 
dent activity should be extended as far as possible, and 
be made compulsory and a requisite for advancement 
in college. The course in citizenship should be the most 
important in the institution; it should be founded upon 
and work in the college home, the college community 
and the college state; and thus teach concretely the 
things which go to make a clean and cultured father, 
husband and friend, a successful professional or busi- 
ness man, and an upright and energetic citizen and prac- 



Resume: The Keynote of the College 365 

tical politician — in the sense that Lincoln and McKinley 
were great practical politicians. All this would help to 
make clearer to every undergraduate the true aim of his 
college education — to enable him to find himself and to 
train him for after life in the different planes of that life 
as a citizen. 

It has been well said that over the portals of every 
educational institution should be written the word 
"Service"; and surely this is true, preeminently, of our 
colleges and their training for citizenship. McClure's 
Magazine for October, 1908, shows how, in our country, 

"One type of citizen — men of force and enterprise un- 
surpassed in the history of the world — by adapting the dis- 
coveries of the most inventive century of the world to the 
uses of commerce, have massed together in the past half 
century a chain of great cities upon the face of a half savage 
continent, and left them to the government of the Euro- 
pean peasant saloon-keeper," 

who has become a political leader among the immi- 
grants who have stopped and swarmed in our cities. 
Hence while 

" the commercial enterprise of these cities has been the 
marvel of the world, their government has reached a point 
of moral degradation and inefl&ciency scarcely less than 
Oriental. " 

The charge is true, in part because the colleges have 
not of later years distinctly trained for citizenship, es- 
pecially upon the high plane of duty toward the state. 
It is not too late for them to mend and to assume their 
former leadership, but no time must be lost. I am 
not afraid to repeat that the earlier college course 
trained for a broad, clean and efficient citizenship in aU 



366 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

its planes, and not for marks; that for many years past 
the college course has trained chiefly for marks and 
a leveling and low-grade diploma; that henceforth the 
keynote of the college course must be training for 
citizenship quite regardless of its diploma value; and 
that this kejmote, which will not be an easy one to 
strike, must be kept constantly before every individual 
and course and department of the college through a 
separate administrative department, acting as the pro 
fessional coach and having foi Its motto; "Team work, 
hard work and good work." 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

CAN WE HAVE A NEW FORM OF AMERICAN COLLEGE AND 
UNIVERSITY? 

Possibly this radical reorganization of our indi- 
vidual institutions may be our opportunity to give our 
higher education a new and strictly American form and 
content. Possibly the present seething mass is not so 
chaotic as it seems, but may be permeated with a spirit 
of new life and growth, which, as so often before, will 
bring great and concrete gains out of apparent con- 
fusion. 

The first form of our college was taken almost en- 
tirely from English schools and colleges, not univer- 
sities. The present form of university-college has been 
largely affected by the Germanic ideals. It is now time 
for us to work out new ideals of the American college 
and university which, while standing on the earlier 
foundations, shall be the products of and in entire ac- 
cord with our own modem civilization and social and 
educational conditions. Let us not be ashamed if this 
be a typically American business reorganization of our 
institutions of higher learning, closely following the 
plans which have been so successful in our great com- 
mercial corporations, and using the same human agen- 
cies which have so often succeeded in other fields. Cer- 

367 



368 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

tainly we have had sufficiently bad net results from the 
ecclesiastico-germanic, pedagogical methods, and almost 
anything would be better than that which we have yet 
worked out. 

If we are to undertake this greater task of remodelling 
our system as well as of reorganizing our individual 
institutions, let us immediately proceed on the broad 
lines of the engineer or architect, and lay out our scheme 
in its entirety. In building, alterations are expensive. 
Let us, then, spend time and money to get our plans 
right before we begin permanent construction. There 
is much clearing of the ground which can and should 
be done at once, and at any cost. This should be done 
by the various institutions for themselves; but the final 
plan must provide for a solid foundation and a super- 
structure worthy of our time and country, adapted to 
use all our present material, and sufficient for our 
present and future wants. 

The first thing is the formulation of a definition of the 
college and of the university. Is it improper for a lay- 
man to suggest that this should be a definition which 
defines, rather than one which begs the question and 
misleads the public and everyone connected with higher 
learning? If there can be a sharp cleavage between, 
the college and the university, well and good. But if 
that is impossible for the present, let us at least work out 
a definition, and build up to it as the years go on. A 
good definition helps to clarify our ideas upon the mat- 
ter defined, and sometimes prevents fraud. The law 
knows the great value of a definition for such purposes, 
and accordingly the statutes are filled with exact defini- 



New Form of College and University 369 

tions of rights, and kinds of property, and as well of 
kinds of frauds and crimes, and of the duties and limita- 
tions of the citizen, etc. For example, in New York 
State, the statute provides that 

"No corporation shall be hereafter organized under the 
laws of this state, with the word trust, bank, banking, in- 
surance, assurance, indemnity, guarantee, guaranty, sav- 
ings, investment, loan or benefit as part of its name, except 
a corporation formed under the banking law or the insurance 
law." • 

Probably it is too much to hope that for the present a 
definite meaning will be given by statute to the words 
"college" and "university," and their improper use for- 
bidden; but this is something that we may aspire to in 
the future when our ideas and ideals of higher educa- 
tion have been raised and clarified. We have spent 
much time, thought and money in differentiating our 
kindergartens, and primary, grammar and high schools, 
and we tell of the ages of the children which each of 
those grades should cover. Possibly we shall even- 
tually be able to get a satisfactory definition of the 
higher members of our educational institutions. At the 
same time we shall come to understand clearly that the 
colleges and universities are not a matter of years but 
of different stages of mental growth and education. 
The place of the college will be fixed and understood, 
and there will be a distinct kind of teaching especially 
adapted to college work, and well differentiated from 
the teaching in university or graduate schools. 

Such a plan, which shall intelligently define the place 

1 Corporation Law, § 6. 



370 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

and scope of the college, can be fully and adequately 
worked out only by the fullest cooperation of high- 
school, college and graduate-school teachers and prin- 
cipals; of the educational institutions themselves, and 
of the great educational funds, and of the general and 
state governments; of broadminded professional men 
and equally broadminded business men; of those who 
know what is due to the state, the institution, the 
teacher, the pupil, the citizen and the family. Such a 
plan must provide for training accurate and fine schol- 
ars, broad thinkers, patriotic and efficient citizens^ 
splendid professional men, and leaders in every walk 
of life, that thereby the college and university may do 
their full duty. The plan must also provide against all 
kinds of waste; for avoidable waste in the college is 
criminal in the highest sense. By intelligent training 
we must fit strong men and thinkers to help us meet 
the critical social and political questions which con- 
front us at home and abroad. There is no greater 
problem before our country to-day than to formulate 
the ideal of the new American college and university, 
for, until this is done, college reorganization, as dis- 
cussed herein, must be largely a dream. Individual in- 
stitutions will not often have the courage to lay the ax 
to the root of the tree, and the work will proceed in a 
desultory manner. But if a more or less comprehensive 
plan can be devised, public sentiment and college pride 
will work together, as in the past, to bring most institu- 
tions to the highest level to which, at the time, they are 
capable of rising. Competition is the life of our college 
world to-day, and competition in a race for a perfect 



New Form of College and University 371 

realization of our new ideal would accomplish more 
than any other agency to bring about a universal im- 
provement in conditions. 

But this new and comprehensive ideal can be for- 
mulated only through a board of uniquely equipped 
experts of recognized standing, acting for a number of 
years, on adequate salaries and with an adequate ex- 
pense fund. They must not only have the ability to 
dissect and analyze present conditions, but be qualified 
for one of the greatest pieces of constructive work and 
reorganization ever undertaken. The cause of educa- 
tion in this country, the parents and the children, the 
great industries and professions, all who are interested 
in the question of education — and that is everyone in 
this broad land — should unite to bring about such a 
magnificent and comprehensive plan for doing our full 
duty to our country and to the generations yet unborn. 
We should not rest content until we have formulated 
and worked out this great monument to the construct- 
ive genius of our country, and especially adapted to 
her peculiar wants and characteristics. Such a board 
might eventually become the governmental agency for 
testing and comparing our great institutions and their 
methods and results, and thus aid and force everyone 
to better and better work. There must be the great 
principle and motto of team work, hard work and good 
work underlying alike our football, our individual col- 
lege and our new ideal of the great series of institutions 
originating in American conditions and adjusted to 
American needs and problems. Its successful appli- 
cation in any of these fields will make it easier to apply 



372 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

it successfully in the others, if we only turn to the very 
best that there is in what we are attempting to do. 

It is proper that the general government, or some 
agency upon its behalf, should be directly concerned in 
formulating our new conception of the American college 
and university. Great as have been the duties of these 
institutions to the state in the past, the calls upon them 
in the future must be much greater, and the colleges 
must be constituted accordingly. The^ must be quali- 
fied in every way to be the leaders in our gre^-t reforms, 
but to this end they must clean up their own houses. 

Meanwhile, each institution must at once undertake 
the formation of an up-to-date administrative depart- 
ment, and from that as a starting point provide for the 
cleaning up and ennobling of its college homes and its 
general student life. In these things it must cordially 
collaborate with its natural rivals and competitors, 
whose local surroundings must much resemble its own. 
And it must not be surprised if it finds that in its new 
attempt to build up a modern, adequate administrative 
department, it has to turn to business men or public 
accountants for the experience which no pedagogue can 
furnish. 

The distinct differentiation and development of the 
college state, the college community and the college 
home will add three new factors of strength to enable 
us to work out the problems presented ijQ these three 
planes of the life of the student citizen. 

First. If our college education is to be distinctly 
nationalized, and to be primarily for the training of 
problem solvers and thinkers in citizenship and clean 



New Form of College and University 373 

manhood, it follows that the institutions which fully 
adopt this new ideal may be entitled to direct national 
or state aid. In the past the nation, the states and the 
local municipal governments have given generously in 
educational crises or to provide permanent funds for 
educational purposes. Possibly the same thing will be 
done again if help is needed in an endeavor to formulate 
a new system and ideal of higher education. 

Second. If the colleges are to reorganize their com- 
munity life upon true business principles, they will call 
for and get the aid of their best business alumni and of 
a high grade of noncoUege business men, who will take 
a new interest in the institutions which are thus to 
undertake a new work in preparing their undergradu- 
ates for business and the professions. This aid will be 
even greater than any that can be given by the state. 

Third. But if the institutions of higher learning are 
to reorganize their college homes, they will call for and 
surely have the cordial cooperation of the parents of 
the land, who now too often and too justly look askance 
at a course in college; and who shall say that the aid, 
financial and otherwise, of the parents will not be the 
greatest of all? It will largely include the alumni and 
will force action by the state. 

The state, the community and the home — ^these 
three; but the greatest of these is the home. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX No. I' 

Your Committee believe that if the Association is to un- 
dertake — as they think it should undertake — the standard- 
ization of American universities, another criterion should 
also be enforced. The policy contemplated has to do with, 
the conditions of admission to professional courses. Your 
Committee are of the opinion that the best American uni- 
versities will in the future rest their professional courses on a. 
basis of college work, which shall range from one to four 
years, and that the professional student will spend at least 
five or six years in study from the day he matriculates in the 
college to the day he receives his professional degree. Your 
Committee accordingly recommend that the Association 
adopt as a second criterion for membership the requirement 
of one or more years of college work as a prerequisite for 
admission to professional courses, the combination being so 
arranged that no professional degree shall be given until the 
satisfactory completion of at least five years of study. 

The ideal of your Committee is the combination of this 
requirement with the present requirement of a strong grad- 
uate school as a condition for membership in this Associa- 
tion. But they recognize that a strict enforcement of both 
requirements might work substantial hardship at the present 
time. Nevertheless they think that in universities which 
have professional schools and a graduate department it is 
not too much to ask at the present time that the graduate 
department shall be at least creditable and that the arts 
and technical work prescribed for professional degrees in at 
1 Page 6. 
377 



378 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

least one professional school shall be not less than five years. 
It is the thought of your Committee that if this dual stand- 
ard of admission be now accepted by the Association it may 
be possible to enforce it with increasing strictness as the 
years go by. They feel, however, that a step of the utmost 
importance would be taken if the Association now insisted 
on the dual requirement, even though in administering it 
concessions were, for a few years, made to some universities 
which were strong in the one direction, but not so fully de- 
veloped in the other. Your Committee are of the opinion 
that American universities cannot be justly standardized 
with reference to graduate departments alone; the require- 
ment of a general or liberal education as a prerequisite to 
professional study along with an extension of the period of 
study for professional students being, in the estimation of the 
Committee, an important consideration. They are of the 
opinion that American universities should be standardized 
with reference to these two criteria. 



APPENDIX No. II' 

"The number of students, or the 'bigness' of the college 
or university, is probably the most useful method of classi- 
fication. But in regard to the number of students one finds 
a range continuous from institutions with fifty students to 
institutions with five thousand, and if in this continuous 
series arbitrary lines are drawn, the groups thus made put 
together institutions whose consideration, side by side, could 
serve no useful purpose; for instance, Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity with the University of Southern California, Yale Uni- 
versity with the Temple College, and Williams College with 
Maryville College. 

' Page 7. 



Appendix 379 

"The size of the teaching staff would naturally be con- 
sidered a more scientific method of classification, but here 
again there is a continuous gradation from institutions with 
five to institutions with five hundred teachers, and groups 
selected on this basis would result in such incongruities as 
placing Valparaiso University with Leland Stanford Junior 
University, Union College, Nebraska, with Amherst College, 
and Howard College at Birmingham, Alabama, with Ripon 
College. 

"The maintenance of professional schools might be con- 
sidered as a significant line of cleavage, but such a means 
of demarcation, which would put in the supposedly less im- 
portant group Princeton, Brown, Wesleyan, Vassar, Bryn 
Mawr, and Trinity (Hartford), and in the higher group such 
institutions as Hamline University, Epworth University, 
Baylor University, Kansas City University, and some forty 
or fifty other essentially minor institutions, cannot be con- 
sidered an illuminating classification. 

"The presence of a certain number of resident graduate 
students is a significant feature of an institution for higher 
education, and might be used to advantage in a classification 
if graduate students in the various institutions had to com- 
ply with similar requirements before being enrolled. It is 
true that the graduate student must have received a college 
degree, but a collegiate degree in the United States means 
anything from a bachelor of arts or a bachelor of science of 
such an institution as the Ohio Northern University, Ada, 
Ohio, up to the bachelor of arts and bachelor of science of 
such universities as Columbia and the University of Chicago. 
Until the collegiate degrees begin to have a definite mean- 
ing, it will be futile to base any classification upon the 
graduate schools, which essentially rest upon these de- 



grees." ' 



' Carnegie Foundation Bulletin, No. Two, p. 2. 



380 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

The classification by the amount of the annual income is 
shown to be equally unsatisfactory. 

"Since American colleges and universities fail under any 
system of classification to fall into natural groups, the only 
available method is to choose arbitrarily a system which is 
most useful for the purpose in view." 



APPENDIX No. Ill* 

CONSTITUTION OF THE BOARD OF STUDENT REP- 
RESENTATIVES APPROVED BY THE UNIVERSITY 
COUNCIL, APRIL 21, 1908. 

Article I 
There is hereby constituted a board to be known as The 
Board of Student Representatives of Columbia University. 

Article II 

The object of this Board shall be: 

(i) To furnish a representative body of men who, by vir- 
tue of their position and influence in student affairs, shall be 
able to express the opinion and wishes of the students. 

(2) To encourage student activities, to make regulations 
for the control and conduct of the same, and to decide mat- 
ters of dispute between student organizations, in so far as 
the exercise of these functions does not conflict with Uni- 
versity legislation. 

(3) To provide a suitable medium through which student 
opinion may be presented to the University authorities. . 

Article III 

The Board shall consist of nine members; one to be elected 

from the College, by vote of College stud' >; one to be 

elected from the Schools of Mines, Engineering and Chem- 

» Page 78. 



Appendix 381 

istry, by vote of students of those Schools; one to be elected 
from the School of Law by vote of Law students; and six to 
be elected, without restriction of School, from the student 
body at large, as provided for in Article VI of this Constitu- 
tion. The Board so elected shall assume oflSce on the day 
after Commencement; and shall hold office during the en- 
suing academic year. Six members of the Board shall con- 
stitute a quorum. 

Article IV 

(i) To be eligible for election from the College a student 
must be, at the time of the election, a regularly matriculated 
student in the College and of Junior standing. 

(2) To be eligible for election from the Schools of Mines, 
Engineering and Chemistry a student must be, at the time of 
the election, a regularly matriculated member of the Third 
Year Class in one of such Schools. 

(3) To be eligible for election from the School of Law a 
student must be, at the time of the election, a regularly 
matriculated student in such School intending to continue 
his studies therein during the ensuing year. 

(4) To be eligible for election from the student body at 
large, a student must be at the time of the election a regu- 
larly matriculated student in Columbia University intending 
to continue his studies therein during the ensuing year. 

Article V 
Each candidate for election from 

(a) the College 

(b) the Schools of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry 

(c) the School of Law 

must be non " *;ed by a member of that student body which 
the candidate represents, and must be seconded by at least 
nine other members of that body. 



382 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

Each candidate for election from 
(d) the student body at large 
must be nominated by a member of the student body and sec- 
onded by nine others, but no restriction of School is imposed. 

All nominations must be filed in writing in the office of 
the Registrar at least two weeks before the first day of the 
election period. 

Nominations not complying with these conditions shall 
not be considered. 

Article VI 

The members of the Board shall be chosen at elections 
held as follows: 

(i) During the first week of the second half of the aca- 
demic year, the student bodies of (a) the College, (b) the 
Schools of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry, (c) the School 
of Law, shall each elect a representative to membership on 
the Board of the following year, with the privilege of at- 
tending without vote all meetings of the then active Board. 

(2) During the last week of April of the same academic 
year there shall be held a general election, open to the entire 
student body of the University, at which the remaining six 
members of the new Board shall be elected. 

(3) At each election all voting shall be by ballot only and 
conducted through the office of the Registrar. The election 
period during which balloting may take place shall extend 
over three days between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. of 
each day. In the elections provided for in Section i of this 
Article, the candidate receiving the highest number of votes 
in each election shall be considered elected. In the general 
election provided for in Section 2 of this Article, the six 
candidates receiving the highest number of votes shall be 
considered elected. 

(4) The Board shall have the power to fill any vacancy 
arising in its membership between elections. 



Appendix 383 

Article VII 

The officers of the Board shall be a Chairman and a Sec- 
retary-Treasurer, who shall hold office for one year. The 
Chairman and Secretary-Treasurer shall be elected by a 
majority vote of the Board at its first regular meeting, which 
meeting shall be held on the day following Commencement. 
The Chairman shall preside at meetings. In the event of his 
absence, the Board may elect a Chairman pro tent. The 
position of Chairman shall carry with it no prerogatives be- 
yond those of an ordinary member, except in cases where the 
Chairman shall be authorized and instructed at a meeting 
of the Board. 

The Secretary-Treasurer shall keep minutes of the meet- 
ings of the Board, shall have custody of its records and 
funds and shall conduct its correspondence. 

Article VIII 
The Board of Student Representatives shall have the right : 
(i) To nominate two undergraduate members of the Uni- 
versity Committee on Athletics, subject to the approval of 
the President of the University. 

(2) To confer with any officer, or representatives of any 
recognized body of officers, of the University, on matters of 
peculiar interest and concern to the student body; and it 
shall furthermore be the right of the Board to receive early 
notice regarding contemplated legislation primarily affecting 
the extracurricular activities of the student body. 

(3) To refer to the President of the University for consid- 
eration matters of peculiar interest and concern to the stu- 
dents. 

Article IX 
The Board shall have authority, and it shall be its duty 
to take into consideration, on its own motion, or upon charges 



384 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

preferred, the conduct of any student or body of students 
which may seem detrimental to the interest or the good 
name of the University; and having conducted an investiga- 
tion, shall itself take, or, where necessary, recommend to the 
appropriate authorities, such action as it deems just and 
reasonable, to the end that such detrimental conduct shall 
be properly reprehended and any repetition of it prevented. 

Article X 

Subject to the reserved power of the University authorities, 
this Board shall exercise control over all inter-class affairs 
and intramural sports. 

The Board shall take charge of all class and general elec- 
tions, and shall have the power to appoint the tjmes for 
holding class elections and all inter-class contests. 

Article XI 

Any petition submitted through the Board shall receive 
official acknowledgment and shall be acted upon by the 
appropriate authorities as soon as may be practicable. 

Article XII 

A report of the Board shall be submitted annually to the 
President of the University on or before June 30th. 

Article XIII 

This Constitution may be amended, upon written notice 
of not less than five days to all members of this Board, by 
vote of seven members of the Board, such amendment, 
before becoming effective, to be ratified by the student 
body and the University Committee on Student Organi- 
zations. 



Appendix 385 

APPENDIX No. IV 

"It will be evident to one who examines with care the 
status of the American college professor that the low scale 
of salaries which obtain in most institutions is due in no 
small measure to the multiplication of weak and unnecessary 
colleges. No two causes have had a larger share in bring- 
ing down the financial reward of the teacher and of taking 
away from the dignity of his position than the tendency to 
multiply the number of colleges with little regard to standards 
and the tendency to expand the curriculum over an enor- 
mous variety of subjects without regard to thoroughness. 
A college of ten professors who are strong teachers, com- 
manding^ fair compensation, and teaching only such sub- 
jects as they can teach thoroughly, is a far better center of 
intellectual life than a college which seeks with the same in- 
come to double the number of professors 'and to expand the 
curriculum to include in a superficial way the whole field 
of human knowledge. It is a true college that chooses to 
add to its curriculum only so fast as it can provide fair sal- 
aries for the work already in hand. It is clear from the 
statistics of institutions given in this Bulletin that the low 
grade of college salaries in a certain group of American 
institutions is due to the attempt to maintain a university 
with an income which is adequate only to the maintenance 
of a good college. The scholarly atmosphere maintained 
at some institutions, whose smaller income has placed them 
in the second group of institutions for which statistics are 
presented, is fairly well connected with the relatively high 
salaries they pay to professors. 

"The payment of a fair salary to the teacher is also 
directly connected with the output of scholariy work and the 
advance of research among college and university teachers. 
' Page 199. 



386 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

A large proportion of the teachers in American universities 
are engaged in turning the grindstone of some outside em- 
ployment with one hand whilst they carry on the work of the 
teacher with the other. Owing to the rise in the cost of 
living the proportion of teachers who seek to increase their 
incomes in this way is very large. The method of organiza- 
tion of the American university also throws a large amount 
of executive [administrative] work upon members of the 
faculty. For this extra compensation is sometimes paid. 
Both processes cut down the opportunity for scholarly study 
and take away from the dignity, simplicity and high-mind- 
edness of the teacher's calling." ' 

"Colleges are beginning to discuss with seriousness the 
need of strong teachers as distinguished from the need for 
material equipment. This fact itself is a hopeful indication 
of educational progress. A movement is on foot among all 
of the better institutions to make the salary of the teacher 
approximate what might be called the line of comfort." ^ 

"The most important thing in regard to the income of 
college teachers, in relation to the cost of living in the com- 
munity in which the college is situated, is whether the salary 
paid by the college is above or below the indispensable line 
of comfort. In every commimity there is a certain sum 
which represents what a man with a family needs to pay 
his landlord, his butcher, his grocer and his tailor. This 
sum must be fixed having in mind the quarter of the town in 
which the college professor should live, how his table should 
be provided, and what his wife and children should wear. 
These requirements need not be luxuriously provided for, 
but they should be provided for as a well-educated and 
refined man needs they should be. If the institution in 
which he teaches pays the professor a few hundred dollars 

> Carnegie Foundation Bulletin, No. Two, p. vii. 
2 Ibid. , p. viii. 



Appendix 387 

above this minimum line of comfort, he is free from worry, 
his family life is cheerful, he can give the best that is in him 
to his institution and its students. An income only a few 
hundred dollars below this level puts the professor in a 
situation involving worry and anxiety. Heretofore little 
has been done to fix salaries in respect to any fair or even 
possible line of comfort. And it has therefore happened 
that at the same time when small economies in salaries have 
lowered an entire faculty into discontent and inefficiency, an 
amount sufl5cient to raise the teaching body into an atmos- 
phere of content and cheerful work has been spent in facing 
the campus buildings with marble, and in giving to the ath- 
letic field the appearance of a Roman amphitheater." ' 

"The question of the method of the appointment of men 
to places requiring a high degree of skill and a wide range 
of culture is difficult and no method has probably been 
devised which insures that the right man may always be 
chosen. The objection to the choosing of professors by a 
president, even assuming a consultation with his immediate 
advisers, is open, among other objections, to the very serious 
one that the choice is usually narrowed to a limited number 
of persons when there might be men excellently qualified 
whose names are never mentioned. In obtaining men for 
high technical places under the Federal Government through 
the Civil Service, chiefs of divisions are often surprised at the 
discovery of men who had been hitherto entirely unknown out- 
side of their own regions, but of a very high order of ability. 

"The effort made to overcome this difficulty which has 
been adopted in the choosing of professors in the Italian 
universities and which has shown excellent results is the 
following. 

"When a vacancy occurs in a professorship in an Italian 
university, the Minister of Public Instruction advertises the 
' Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. Two, p. 36. 



388 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

vacancy in the journal of the department and bulletins an- 
nouncing the existence of the vacancy are posted in uni- 
versities or in other places likely to attract the notice of 
possible candidates. Any person may apply for the position. 
His application must be accompanied by certain biograph- 
ical information, together with a complete statement of his 
record as a teacher and of his scientific or literary activities. 
His publications must accompany the application. All ap- 
plications must be made within a certain date. 

"In order to decide between the applicants a jury is se- 
lected, the faculty of each university in the country being 
invited to vote for members of the jury, these being neces- 
sarily professors of the same subjects or of a kindred sub- 
ject to that in which the vacancy occurs. Each faculty votes 
for five jurors. The Minister of Public Instruction chooses 
five names from amongst ten having the highest votes. 
The applications of the candidates are then turned over to 
this jury. They report to the Minister three names in the 
order of merit and the appointment is offered to the first; 
if he refuses, to the second; and if he refuses, to the third. 

"It should be mentioned that in exceptional cases the 
faculty of the institution in which the vacancy occurs may 
request the filling of the vacancy by a direct call to another 
professor of the same subject in another university. 

" In sharp contrast to this method of choice there has been 
developed in nearly all American institutions a system of in- 
breeding under which young graduates are appointed as- 
sistants, and then advanced to instructorships, and later are 
promoted to the faculty." ' 

> Carnegie Foundation Bulletin No. Two, p. 56. 



Appendix 389 

APPENDIX No. V 

Much space is devoted by the Carnegie Foundation to 
the dissimilarity of remuneration among the instructors. 

"Columbia University and Harvard University have al- 
most the same number of persons in their teaching forces, 
559 and 573 respectively, and about an equal proportion of 
each force are professors. The average salaries at Harvard 
for the full professors and for the assistant professors are 
higher than are the average salaries at Columbia for the 
full professors and for the adjunct professors; yet the total 
annual amount expended by Columbia in salaries to the in- 
structing staff is $300,000 larger than is the similar expendi- 
ture by Harvard University. After making allowance for 
the salary budget appropriated by Radcliffe College (Bar- 
nard College being included in the figures for Columbia 
University) this excess of the Columbia budget is equal to the 
total annual income received by an institution of the size of 
Dartmouth College. At least half of this difference between 
the salary expenditures at Columbia and at Harvard is due 
to the difference in the salaries paid in the teaching grades 
below faculty rank. The average instructor at Harvard re- 
ceives $753 a year less than the average instructor at Co- 
lumbia, and in the grade of assistant the difference between 
the two college departments is about $150. There is also 
a considerable difference between the average salary of the 
junior officer at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of 
Columbia, and the similar average for the Medical School of 
Harvard. These amounts of $750 and $150 do not seem 
much in themselves, but when they are multiplied by the 
large number of teachers who in a great university such as 
Harvard hold the titles of instructor and assistant, the re- 
sult is a saving of about $130,000 a year, enough to pay all 
' Page 293. 



390 The Reorganization oj Our Colleges 

the salaries of all the professors and of all the other teachers 
at either Brown University, or at Wellesley or at Vassar." 

As to varying instructional demands upon the teaching 
force of different institutions, the Bulletin says (p. 49): 

"This variation amongst institutions is a very important 
fact. Why should one institution of those given in Table 
II need three times as many teachers per hundred students 
as another institution, or inversely, how can one of them get 
along with a third as large a staff per hundred students as 
another has? Should one college provide five times as 
many (or as few) teachers to a hundred students as another? 
This great variability may mean (i) great differences in the 
educational problems met by different institutions, all doing 
their work with the same adequacy, or it may mean (2) that 
the resources of some are inadequate, or it may mean (3) 
that the resources of some are not perfectly employed, or 
it may mean a combination of two or three of these con- 
ditions. A painstaking investigation of the exact condition 
of the staff, students, and curriculum in each institution is 
evidently very much needed." 

Again the Bulletin says (p. 62): 

"The amount of teaching which institutions of different 
grades calling themselves colleges or universities exact of a 
professor, an assistant professor or an instructor, varies so 
greatly with the standards of the institution and the status 
of education in its region that it is impossible to give any 
complete statement concerning it without a full list of the 
professors of each institution, the number of recitation peri- 
ods and the amount of laboratory work assigned to them. 
In general it may be said that the full professor in the 
stronger universities is called upon to give from six to twelve 
hours a week of lectures or recitations, covmting two hours 
of laboratory or seminar exercises as equivalent to one hour 
of lecture or recitation. In the better smaller universities 



Appendix 391 

and colleges from twelve to fifteen hours a week of lectures 
and recitations are counted as the ordinary work of a pro- 
fessor. In a number of institutions as many as twenty-five 
hours a week of recitations and lectures are demanded. 
Such excessive demands upon the professor are invariably 
associated with low standards, the effort for numbers and the 
widespread attempt in American colleges to give instruction 
in every conceivable study. The number of teaching hours 
a week imposed upon the teacher and the amount of admin- 
istrative detail added to them are directly related not only 
to the question of good teaching but also to the possibilities 
of the teacher for study, for growth and for scholarly pro- 
ductiveness. The present bulletin was compiled from data 
dealing with the financial status of the teacher in the higher 
institutions. A statement concerning matters relating to the 
scholarly status of the professor will be prepared later." 

At another point the Bulletin says (p. 51): 

"Nor will anyone informed concerning higher education 
deny that the teaching resources of some institutions are 
inadequate. The significance of our data lies in the fact 
that unless there is some waste in some institutions, there 
is an enormous inadequacy in others. After making every 
allowance for differences in the proportion of part-time pro- 
fessors and assistants, for differences in the character of the 
work, and the like, it seems strange that we should find among 
institutions doing work of approximately equal diflficulty, some 
with a provision of over twice as many teachers as others. 

"This fact is, perhaps, the most important one that ap- 
pears in comparing institutions for higher education. It 
leads at once to this question, ' Given a college of liberal arts 
and sciences, or a medical school, or a law school of a certain 
size, what is the number of teachers that the administrative 
authority has a right to demand of the financial authorities 
for the proper conduct of the work,' and to the further ques- 



392 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

tion, ' Given a certain sum for salaries for such a college or 
school of a certain size, how much must be sacrificed in the 
quality of the teachers in order to get enough teachers?' 

"If the country as a whole could afford a teacher for 
every three university students, it might be wise economy; 
but if the country as a whole can afford only one for 
eleven, it may be a waste for one institution to have many 
more than its share. There is presumably an optimum 
proportion of instructors to students, movement toward 
which brings increasing educational returns for each teacher 
added, and movement beyond which brings diminishing 
returns. 

"Some university teachers will deny this doctrine of di- 
minishing returns, and very many of them will deny that 
any institution in this country has passed beyond this opti- 
mum proportion. The matter needs investigation, but the 
experience of elementary and secondary education and the 
general facts of human nature support the belief that, after 
the groups in which students are divided for instruction 
reach a certain minimum, further division produces very 
little educational gain. Indeed, there is some support for 
the belief that a class of fifteen students in the majority of 
undergraduate or professional subjects is absolutely better 
than a class smaller in number and that a seminar or pro- 
seminar or other specialized course is more efficient with 
eight students than with less. In any event it is as much the 
duty of the educational administration to use funds econom- 
ically as it is the duty of society to provide more money for 
higher education. With all due regard to the necessity of 
presenting a wide range of subjects for study and of giving 
students close personal attention, it seems proper that an 
increase of the staff of a university beyond twelve men for a 
hundred students, or of the staff of a college beyond nine 
men for a hundred students, should be regarded not, as it 



Appendix 393 

now is, as an unmixed good, but as a step that may demand 
justification as truly as would an equal decrease. 

"The second question suggested by the great variation 
in the number of students per instructor was, ' Given a cer- 
tain sum for salaries for a university or college of a given size, 
how much must be sacrificed in the quality of the teachers 
in order to have enough teachers?' As a concrete sample 
of this problem let us suppose an undergraduate college like 
that for men at Princeton, or for women at Mt. Holyoke, to 
have enrolled 200 freshmen, 160 sophomores, 150 juniors, 
and 140 seniors, a total of 650, and to have an allowance for 
salaries of $70,000. Shall it employ 80 teachers at an aver- 
age salary of less than $goo, or 60 teachers at an average 
salary of nearly $1,200, or 40 teachers at an average salary 
of nearly $1,800? In the first case it can provide twice as 
many courses or give each member of the stafif only half as 
many hours of teaching as in the last case. Keeping the 
latter alike in both cases it could offer say 300 courses in the 
first case, and only 150 in the second. 

"Suppose the allowance for salaries to be the relatively 
high one of $140,000. Shall the institution have a staff of 
80 at an average salary of $1,800 or a staff of 60 at an aver- 
age salary of $2,400, or a staff of 40 at an average salary of 
$3,600, with consequences as before to the amount of teach- 
ing of each member of the staff, or to the variety of the 
courses offered to the students? 

"The figures concerning the number of students per in- 
structor strongly support the criticism that the American 
colleges and universities are offering too many courses. 
One three-thousand-dollar man teaching a class of thirty- 
six students probably means better progress in education 
than two fifteen-hundred-dollar men each teaching eighteen 
of the thirty-six. With a given sum to spend and a given 
number of students, salaries can be increased only by di- 



394 The Reorganization of Our Colleges 

minishing the number of courses taught by an individual. 
Either of these alternatives seems preferable to leaving sal- 
aries at their present low level, and the former seems feasible 
without any alarming loss in the adequacy of college curric- 
ula to the need of college students. 

''One may well hesitate to oppose any widening of the 
scope of an institution's offering in science and letters. But 
the educational welfare of the students is in the long run 
more dependent on the quality of the teaching profession 
than on all other causes. And the increase of courses is not 
mainly due to greater needs of the student body. On the 
contrary, it may be irrational. 

"The professor at the head of a department is usually 
a specialist, zealous for the subject he loves, not interested 
in and unacquainted with the facts of university economy. 
He is eager to see his department flourish and to that end 
adds courses. He dislikes to have a student wish for a cer- 
tain course in his junior year because it is for economy 
given only biennially. Often he fails to appreciate that 
biennial courses may mean a doubled salary allowance per 
man. He does not feel quite justified in demanding a 
greater salary for himself, even though he is wasting the uni- 
versity's energy in copying quotations, building fires and 
hunting about the town for a cheap tailor. But he feels it 
his duty to beg for an additional man in the department. 
He is, perhaps, conscious that better men, and hence higher 
salaries, must be the means of advancing his or other de- 
partments in the long run, but whenever the question is pro- 
visionally raised he tends to take the line of least resistance 
and ask for an addition which will not bring up the question 
of raising the institution's scale of salaries. 

"The college president, while more appreciative of the 
general issue, tends likewise to take the line of least resis- 
tance. A thousand dollars five times is easier to ask for 



Appendix 395 

than five thousand dollars once. Ever hoping that the finan- 
cial authorities will follow his broad recommendations to 
raise the salary schedule, he makes specific recommendations 
for increasing the number of courses, which in the end 
make consent to his appeal for a higher schedule impossible. 
Moreover he, too, is ambitious for the growth of his institu- 
tion; he loves to see it do every desirable thing that other 
institutions do; he finds it easier to get more courses than to 
get better men. 

"In some cases there has been on the part of heads of de- 
partments and heads of colleges nothing less than a passion 
to increase the variety of courses and the size of the staff. 
A course is given though only five out of a thousand students 
take it, and though these five would probably be as much 
profited by some other course already offered. Yet to give 
that course is to withhold an increase of twenty or twenty- 
five per cent to some individual's salary. No institution 
for higher education in this country should, with its present 
salary schedule, increase its programme of studies except 
after most careful consideration. 

"There also has been an insufficient cooperation between 
departments and between institutions. If all the depart- 
ments of an institution would agree to ask for no added 
appropriation for five years on condition that the salary 
schedule be then raised by a certain amount, the president 
could recommend a rise in quality as an alternative to a 
rise in number. In many things institutions might profit- 
ably cooperate. There does not seem, for example, any ne- 
cessity for two universities in the same city to give courses 
in Syriac. Even where large universities are separated by 
several hours' journey, they might well consider whether 
each of them should give courses in Icelandic, in Pali, and 
in Old Portuguese. A division of labor might well be ar- 
ranged in such subjects. 



396 The Reorganization 0} Our Colleges 

"Indeed this division of labor could be extended with 
profit into wider fields than a few recondite courses. If 
different institutions would cooperate, whereby one would 
provide an elaborate programme of studies for graduate 
students in, say, the physical sciences, another a similar spe- 
cialization in the mental sciences, and another similarly for 
the modem languages and literatures, and so on, there 
might be a decided gain for the welfare of American edu- 
cation as a whole. There would certainly be a gain in the 
pecuniary rewards of American professors." 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Accountant, should be in charge of 
finances, 22, 340, 341. 

Accounting systems, results of , 227- 
234. See Bookkeeping. 

Activities, student, what are, 64, 

65- 
Administration, present college sys- 
tem imperfect, 26, 27; and 
student life are like trained 
nurses, 30, 31; must be devel- 
oped, not carried, 35, ;^6; lack 
of, in fraternities, 100; would 
have foreseen evil results, 136; 
needed during expansion of 
colleges, 153, 154; important 
in college work, 163; its nature 
and growth, 165, 166; is an 
atmosphere and science, 165- 
167, 177-179; how it treats 
new problems, 166-172; col- 
leges err as to, 168-173; il- 
lustrated by cigar company, 
1 69-171; difference between 
pedagogy and, 170-172; difl&- 
culties of, not relatively great 
in colleges, 1 71-173; in other 
corporations, 172, 173; how 
regarded in colleges, 173-180; 
power of, 172, 173; how re- 
garded in business, 173-175; 
should not be an adjunct to 
pedagogy, 168, 175, 180; ob- 
jects of, 179, 180; none in ear- 
lier colleges and times, 181, 
182; variable factors in college 
found in, 182; need of, comes 
from an increase in numbers 
and intricacy, 201, 202; when 
absolutely necessary, 202, 203; 
how problems of, have in- 
creased in colleges, 201, 202; 



Administration — Cont. 

requires cleavage into de- 
partments, 202; required by 
changes in colleges, 202-204; 
is an added expense without 
direct producing power, 205- 
216, 352; on railroads and in 
construction work, 206; pre- 
ceptorial system is, 207; vari- 
ous kinds of agencies of, dis- 
cussed, 207-214; departments 
of, in a business, 209; how 
it has grown, 210; why col- 
lege must have, 210-212, 226; 
must be conducted by ex- 
perts, 211, 214; regulates in- 
ternal affairs, 212-214; re- 
sults of, at Columbia, 213, 
214; must cover diversities 
of college and have common 
data, 219-222; how presidents 
and professors should study, 
239; and the marking system, 
245-257; publicity bureau, 
280-288; character and course 
of head of, 297-306; motto of, 
297; men demanded in, 298; 
how to be applied, 299-303; 
criticisms as to, 299-306; will 
insure good pedagogical re- 
sults, 300; and prevent jeal- 
ousy in faculties, 300-303 ; cost 
of, and how defrayed, 303- 
306; will add to college funds, 
305; training experts in, 298, 
299 ; relation of, to student life, 
307-312; must be coordinated, 
307; and allow for differences 
in homes and colleges, 308- 
312; must improve college 
community life and homes, 



399 



400 



Index 



Administration — Cont. 

308-312; must arrange for rec- 
reation, 309; must train indi- 
viduals, 310; must insist on 
gymnastics and physical ex- 
aminations, 310; must rule by 
college sentiment, 312; must 
enforce college motto, 329, 
330; will enforce good work in 
all departments, 338, 339; sep- 
arate department of, 352-362; 
an expense and nonproducer, 
352; must be adapted to con- 
ditions and size of college, 353 ; 
is in experimental stage, 353; 
bureaus of administrative de- 
partment (i) of statistics and 
forms, 354, 355; (2) of college 
■waste heap, 355 ; (3) of college 
activities, 356; (4) of college 
homes, 356; (5) of health and 
physical exercises, 356, 357; 
(6) of graduate field, 357; (7) 
of college plant, 357, 358; (8) 
of publicity, 358; (9) Mark 
Hopkins or personal equation 
bureau, 358-362; must con- 
serve character-building capi- 
tal and influence of teachers, 
359-362; student must carry 
away impress of teacher, 359, 
360; the true capital of the 
college, 360; influence upon 
freshmen, 361, 362; duties of 
head of, 362. See also Col- 
leges. 

Administrative, definition of, 313, 
314. 
department. See Administra- 
tion. 

Advertising, principally through in- 
tercollegiate athletics and the 
effects thereof, 280-283. ^^^ 
Publicity. 

Alumni, duties in regard to frater- 
nities, 116; power in under- 
graduate affairs, 123; belief as 
to moral conditions, 136, 137; 
have worked out forms, prece- 
dents and records in athletics, 



Alumni — Cont. 

226, 227; experience with 
forms and blanks, 233-234; 
could help in studying college 
waste heap, 258, 265. See 
Fraternities. 

American college and university, 
new form of, 367-373. 

Amherst College, students in, from 
other states, 55, 56; honor sys- 
tem at, 78-80; value of fra- 
ternity property at, 100. 

Association of American Univer- 
sities, report of committee on 
membership, 6, 375. 

Athletics. See College Community 
Life, Intercollegiate Athletics. 

Atmosphere, the university is an; 
administration is an, 165. See 
College Atmosphere. 

Auditing. See Bookkeeping. 



Banks, New York, presidents of, 
318. 

Banquets, heavy drinking at, 137. 

Bentley, R. C, 267. 

Blank forms, college does not use 
intelligently, 223; three kinds 
of, 223-230; as precedents in 
law, insurance policies, etc., 
224-226; used in intercollegi- 
ate athletics, 225, 226; and 
the results therefrom, 226; to 
increase productive effective- 
ness and train experts, 226, 
227; cost accounting system, 
227-234; reports of railroads, 
227-234; internal effect there- 
of, 228, 229; cost accounting, 
effect of, 229, 230; no checking 
off of departments in colleges, 
230; attitude of business con- 
cerns toward, 230, 231; are 
prevalent everywhere, except 
in college, 231, 232; how lack 
of, weakens college, 231, 232; 
must not be made a fetish, 
233; under marking system, 
245-257; bureau of, 354, 355. 



Index 



401 



Boarding houses, college, 97, 98, 
107-111, 350-352. See Col- 
lege Home. 

Boarding schools, atmosphere of, 
94; vices in, 133, 134. 

Bookkeeping, growth from single 
entry to double entry, 215,216; 
growth from double entry, 215, 
216; college still in single en- 
try stage, 216; has provided 
new units of measurement, 
217-219; can cover diversities 
in colleges, 219; present col- 
lege, based on a diploma, and 
does not analyze internal con- 
ditions, 220; crude, in one uni- 
versity, 220, 221; colleges 
should have the very best, 221, 
222; nature of, in colleges, 222; 
results of accounting system, 
227-234; in financial depart- 
ment, 340. 

Bowery Mission, 138. 

Briggs report, 197, 210, 211, 238, 
337; is an inventory, 238. 

Buildings, too much should not be 
spent upon, 305, 306. 

Bureaus, different in college. See 
Administration. 

Busting out, 253, 277-279. 

Canfield, James H., quotations 
from report of, 17-19, 186, 
266, 267. 

Capital, and income of colleges, 
190; true, of the college, 360— 
362; how conserved and used, 
360-362; should be in liquid 
form, 305, 306. 

Carnegie, Foundation, 194, 199, 
237, 286, 292-296, 378-380, 
385-396; library gifts, 294- 
296. 

Changes, in college conditions and 
methods, 11, 203, 204. 

Character-building, 359-362. 

Children of college graduates, sta- 
tistics as to, 142. 

Cigars, combination in making of, 
169, 170. 



Citizen, relation of, to the state or 
government, 40-43; students 
have same relations to college, 
45, 46; how government and 
internal relations of colleges 
are to be studied, 49; most un- 
dergraduates, minors, 47; un- 
desirable, 7 1-73; trainingof, in 
student life, 116, 117. See also 
Citizenship, Colleges, State. 

Citizenship, physical education in 
preparing for, 83-87; training 
for, 16, 17, 372, 373; course in, 
364-366; most important in 
college, 364; should study col- 
lege conditions, and train for 
eificient citizens and practical 
politicians, 364,365; previous 
failure in regard to, 365, 366. 
See also Citizen. 

Coach, canvassing athletic material 
by, 24; needs no examinations, 
268, 269. 

Colleges, how word is used herein, 
9, 10, 48; new form of, 367- 
373; and universities, distinc- 
tion between, 6-8, 368, 369; 
change in nature of, 36-50; 
wealth and power of, 37; are 
political or municipal corpora- 
tions, 38, 39; quasi public, like 
railroads, 38, 39; gradual de- 
velopment to quasi municipal 
corporations, 40; relation of 
student citizen to, 40-47; how 
we must study parts of, 49; 
dissimilarity in, 44; objects of, 
14-20, 153-157; now exer- 
cising public functions, and 
capstone of compulsory pub- 
lic-school system, 53, 54, 331, 
332; boarding houses in, 97, 
98, 107-111, 350-352; are 
public servants, like railroads, 
and should be under same 
control, 58; if they go astray, 
it is not merely a pedagogical 
matter, 59; close connection 
with state and its homes, par- 
ents, citizens, 59, 60; what 



402 



Index 



Colleges — Cont. 

state aid to, implies, 55 ; duties 
toward state, 89; capital and 
income of, 190; increase of stu- 
dents of, 191, 192; overwork- 
ing teachers, 190-194; need 
liquid capital, 305, 306; need 
large income rather than large 
endowments, 304-306; aims 
and duties of, must be defined, 
331; need patriotism for the 
state, and to train for citizen- 
ship, 332, 333; number of, 205; 
how methods and fields of in- 
struction of, have changed, 
204, 205 ; competition for num- 
bers, 194; should have best 
accounting system, 221, 222. 
See Administration, College, 
injra, Ear her Colleges, Peda- 
gogy, Reorganization. 
College, activities, 64, 65; bureau 
of, 356. 

administration. See Adminis- 
tration. 

administrative problems increase 
with size, 201-214. 

admission to, 278, 279; waiting 
list in, 275-279. 

atmosphere, importance of, 70- 
74, 86-89, 122 ; effect on young 
men, 137; good, must be as- 
sured, 351. 

authorities, have not studied their 
own conditions, 68, 69; re- 
sponsible for college vices, 
128-131, 138-145. 

course, objectives of, 14-17. 

community life, nature of, 46- 
49; not well differentiated in 
early college, 61-63; ^^ longer 
a simple matter, 63, 64; covers 
a distinct life period, 64, 65; 
and recognized student activ- 
ities, 64; is important part of 
college education, 66-74; rep- 
resents the soil, 66-68; interest 
of college in, direct, 68; direct 
effect upon students of, 68; not 
understood by college author- 



College — Cont. 

ities, 68, 69; close acquaint- 
ances in, 69; complete change 
from earlier times, 70; badly 
affected by course of colleges, 
70, 71; tends to lower scholar- 
ship, 71 ; students go wrong in, 
71; place in training for citi- 
zenship, 71-73; relation of ad- 
ministration to, 307-312; vari- 
ances in, 308-312; must be 
kept clean and inspiring, 310- 
312; covers picked men, 348; 
poUtics in, 348, 349; compe- 
tition in, 350-352. See Stu- 
dent Life Department. 

departments of, 21-32. 

discipline. See Discipline. 

dormitories. See Dormitories. 

education, how words are used 
herein, 16; formerly a luxury, 
51; and built up aristocracy, 
52; final molding for citizen- 
ship, 220, 221; must be nation- 
alized, 372, 373; how its ele- 
ments have changed, 240—244; 
what it must be, 332-338; how 
we must individualize, 333— 
338; soft culture courses, 334- 
337; must hold up high ideals, 
ii'^i 337; college must im- 
prove itself, 337, 338. See 
Education. 

field, must be studied, 240-244; 
bureau of, 357. See Field. 

finances should be under skilled 
accountants and reports be 
very full, 21-23, 339-341- 

home life, how governed and re- 
formed, 40-43, 47-50; must 
reach personal habits through, 
81, 82; like any other home, 
90, 91; must exist in college, 
90; every student has it, 90, 
91; badly neglected, 91, 92; 
must be affected by permanent 
human influences, 92, 93; 
which must work from within, 
92, 93; importance of restoring 
it to its proper place, 94; value 



Index 



403 



College — Cont. 

in eyes of forefathers, 94, 95. 
See also Fraternities. Con- 
nection of, with college vices, 
1 18-145. See College Vices. 
Undue importance often given 
to, 152-155; has been running 
wild, 155, 156; in connection 
with college temptations, 160, 
161 ; forces of, overstimulated, 
152-154; how effected by ad- 
ministration, 307-312; must 
allow for variance in, 307-310; 
good times in, 309; must be 
kept clean, 311, 312; rights 
and duties of college in, 311; 
how misunderstood, 328; cov- 
ers picked young men, 348; its 
social problems, 349; compe- 
tition between, 350; requisites 
of, 351, 352; the ideal college 
home, 352; parents and others 
should study, 352; bureau of 
college homes, 356. See Col- 
lege Community Life, Student 
Life Department. 

inventory, 235-239. 

life, how words are used herein, 
9, 48; no longer a simple affair, 
63, 64; covers a recognized life 
period, 64. 

marking system. See Marking 
System. 

methods, very crass, 258, 259. 

motto. See Motto. 

pedagogy. See Pedagogy. 

plant, study of, 235-239; inven- 
tory of, 235-239; how trusts 
take inventories, 235, 236; bu- 
reau of, 357, 358. 

president. See President. 

reorganization. See Reorgan- 
ization. 

temptations, importance of, i6c, 
161. 

training, how words are used 
herein, 16. See Citizenship, 
College Education. 

vices, reasons for discussion of, 
118, 119; are moral, not legal 



College — Cont. 

misdemeanors, 118, 119; how 
they should be studied, 11 9- 
125; differ in different institu- 
tions at different times, 1 20,121; 
affected by college atmosphere, 
1 21-124; what they compre- 
hend, 124, 125; attitude of stu- 
dents toward, 125; caused by 
local and other conditions, 
126-128; where most preva- 
lent, 126-128; make student 
life most important depart- 
ment, 127; danger of disease, 
127, 128; counteracting, 128; 
made worse by authorities and 
alumni, 128-131 ; havenot been 
properly studied, 129, 145; im- 
proper lectures, 129; growth 
because of lack of adminis- 
trative department, 130, 131; 
is there proof as to, 131-139; 
statement of medical depart- 
ments, 131, 132; affect the 
commonwealth, 132; instances 
of, 132-137; brought from 
preparatory schools, 133, 134; 
growth of drinking habit, 
134-139; even in denomina- 
tional colleges, 135; drinking 
clubs, 135, 136; drinking at 
commencement and alumni 
and fraternity banquets, 136- 
138; how these vices are re- 
garded by railroads and other 
corporations, 134, 138; effect 
on young boys, 137; and on 
college graduates, 138; posi- 
tion of authorities as to, 139; 
discussion from point of reor- 
ganizer, 139, 140, 144; and of 
duty to state, 140-145; as af- 
fecting future of graduates, 
142 ; touch every home in state, 
142, 143; colleges should pre- 
vent, 143, 144. 
waste heap, and college vices, 
121, 138; size of, 184; how to 
be studied, 258-265 ; how man- 
ufacturers study their waste 



404 



Index 



College— Conf. 

products, 258, 259; what com- 
posed of, 259-261; waste of 
costly products stopped in fac- 
tories, but not in colleges, 260, 
261 ; purposes of study of, 261, 
262; how conditions will be 
analyzed, 260-262; we should 
rate institutions according to 
size of, 263; governmental bu- 
reau to help study, 263, 264; 
and demand annual account- 
ing, 264, 265; bureau of, 355. 
See also Colleges. 

Columbia, size in 1850, 30; student 
government at, 77, 380; value 
of fraternity property at, 100; 
pay of teachers at, 197; results 
ofbusinessmethodsin,2i3,2i4. 

Commencement, drinking at, 136, 
137; enthusiasm at, 152. 

Commonwealth. See State. 

Community life, how governed and 
reformed, 40-42; importance 
of, 373- See also College 
Community Life. 

Cost of administrative department, 
303-306. 

Cost accountant, 212, 340. 

Cost accounting, how it has grown, 
216-222; absolutely necessary 
in colleges, 216-222; results of, 
227-234. 

Credit man, 212. 

Culture courses, growth of, in state 
universities, 8, 9. See Soft 
Culture Courses. 

Dartmouth, under first president, 
182, 183. 

Debts of cities and states, 37. 

Definition of college and university, 
6, 368, 369, 377. 

Denominational institutions, col- 
lege vices in, 123, 124, 135; 
lack of uniformity in, 292. 

Differentiation, of administrative 
departments, 202; in college 
departments, 211, 212, 338, 
339, 3^3- 



Diploma, universal value of col- 
lege, 56; on the marking-sys- 
tem basis, 251; meaning and 
value of present, 310, 328, 332, 
365; studying for, 334-338. 
See Marking System. 

DiscipUne, in earlier colleges, 181- 
184; in the reorganized college, 
270-274; will follow planes of 
college life, 270, 271; story of 
mouse, 270, 271; not under- 
stood, arbitrary and autocrat- 
ic, 271-274; story of student 
flunked in gymnastics, 272; 
bad results of present system, 
274. 

Dormitories, not being built by 
state universities, 97; many 
colleges have none, 97-99; cost 
of, 98-100; ideal size of, 106, 
107, 115; in coeducational 
college, no. See also College 
Home Life, Fraternities. 

Double-entry bookkeeping, 2 15- 
222. 

Drunkenness. See College Vices. 

Earlier colleges, tutors' connection 
with home life of, 31; charac- 
teristics of, 36, 45; trained 
scriptural controversialists, 51 ; 
right to education determined 
by parents or church, 54; com- 
munity and home Ufe in, 61- 
63, 69, 70; care of personal 
habits in, 61-63; founded on 
private schools, 195, 196; 
marking system in, 245, 246, 
256, 257; presidents of, 314. 

Education, now scientific and spe- 
cialized, 52; universal and 
compulsory, 54; enormous ex- 
penditures for, 55-59; much 
now falsely so called, 183, 184; 
often does not look for facts, 
217. See College Education. 
United States Department of, 
263-265. 

Elective system, 171. 

Eliot, President, 122, 203-205, 217. 



Index 



405 



English grammar schools, report 
upon, 17-19. 

Evidence, as to college vices, 118- 
120, 131-139. 

Examinations, in reorganized col- 
lege, 266-269. 

Executive, how it was evolved, 313; 
definition of, 313, 314. 
department, 27. See President. 

Factory, accountant in financial de- 
partment, 340; practice, 188- 
198. 

Field, of the reorganized college; 
how business men study their 
field, 240; change in college 
field, 240, 241; necessitates 
administrative improvements, 
241-243; how one factory stud- 
ied its field, 241-243; students 
handicapped because college 
has not studied its field, 243, 
244. 

Financial department of college, 
21-23, 217, 220, 221; how 
accounts in, are to be kept, 339 ; 
should have expert factory ac- 
countant, 340; cost system in, 
340, 341- 

Flexner, Abraham, "The American 
College," 25, 198. 

Flogging, at Harvard, 63. 

Forms. See Blank Forms. 

Football, its prominence and mot- 
to, 326-330; growth not acci- 
dental, 327; what its motto 
means, 329. See Intercollegi- 
ate Athletics. 

Fraternities, canvassing freshmen, 
24; and the college home, 
96-145; houses of, came 
when college neglected college 
homes, 96, 97; distinction be- 
tween their houses and college 
boarding houses, 96-98; cost 
of houses of, 98; have changed 
center of gravity of student 
body, 99; own typical homes 
of ordinary college, 99; value 
of their properties, 99, 100; 



Fraternities — Cont. 

will soon enter home-making 
stage, 99, 100; field secretary 
of, and results of his work, loi, 
102; what this experiment has 
proved, 102, 103; best point 
from which to study student 
conditions, 102, 103; all fra- 
ternities can do good like 
work, 103, 104; panhellenism, 
power of alumni in homes, 104, 
105; alumni in nonfraternity 
colleges, 105, 106; importance 
of, 106-108; colleges should 
provide for nonfraternity men, 
107-114; provide homes, not 
barracks, 107-109; have done 
something, colleges nothing, 
109-112; have made some rec- 
ords, III, 112; give social 
training, 112, 113; growth of, 
not accidental, 113, 114, 326, 
327; life in, concealed, 114, 
115; moral tendencies some- 
times bad, 115-117; training 
for citizenship, 116, 152; re- 
lation to high-school fraterni- 
ties, 117. See also College 
Vices. Drinking at banquets 
of, 137; unregulated, 153, 154; 
hence have disturbed colleges, 
171; marking system for those 
endeavoring to learn standing 
of undergraduates, 246-250; 
duties of, 311-312; competi- 
tion between, 350-352. Se6 
College Home Life. 

French Lycees, 17-19. 

Freshmen, how cared for, 24, 25, 
361, 362. 

Garfield, President, ideal of a uni- 
versity, 341. 

Germanization, of colleges, 171. 

Germany, gymnasium and univer- 
sity in, 194, 195; length of 
her educational courses, 244; 
teacher in university of, power 

of. 352,- 
Gymnastics, compulsory, 310. 



4o6 



Index 



Hadley, James, 245. 

Harper, William R., 8. 

Harvard, size of early classes, 30; 
why founded, 45; flogging at, 
63; pay of teachers at, 197; 
changes of methods and fields 
of instruction at, 204, 205; 
lack of intelligible marks in, 
246; earlier presidents of, 314; 
use of Latin at, 336; financial 
system in, 340. 

Health and physical exercises, bu- 
reau of, 356, 357. 

High schools, growth and improve- 
ment of, 9; influence of student 
life department upon, 161, 
162; fraternities at, 117. 

Home, importance of, 373; college, 
see College Home Life. 

Honor system, at Amherst, 78-80. 

Hopkins, Mark, 341; bureau, 358- 
362. 

Human agents, affecting college 
home, 92. 

Ideal, of reorganized college, 325- 
330. See Motto. 

Insurance, use of forms and prece- 
dents in, 224, 225; regulation 
of, 212; companies in New 
York, presidents of, 317, 318. 

Intercollegiate athletics, part of 
college community life, 75, 82- 
89; used largely for advertis- 
ing, 83 ; should be for develop- 
ment, 83, 84; maintenance of 
health, 85; preparation for life, 
85; and recreation, 86, 87; 
should not interfere with other 
duties, 87; should be largely 
governed by human agent, 88, 
89; results of not regulating, 
171; dominance of, 151, 152, 
155-162; use of forms, prece- 
dents and records in, 224, 225; 
possible only because rules 
and records are standardized, 
255; coach needs no examina- 
tions, 268, 269; have been 
chief method of advertising, 



Intercollegiate athletics — Corit. 
280, 281; results thereof, 281, 
282. See also College Com- 
munity Life. 

Inventory of the college, 235-239. 

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 35. 
Jesse, President, 87, 88. 
Judson, Harry Pratt, 106. 

Law, use of forms and precedents 

in, 224, 225. 
Lincoln, Abraham, 297, 365. 
Looking backward, 35. 

Manufacturer, how he studies his 
plant, 188-194; his field, 240- 
244; and waste products, 258- 
265. 

Marking system, diploma, 150, 158, 
159; units under, 218; use of, 
in earlier times, 245, 246; story 
of Professor Hadley, 245, 246; 
present system valueless, 246; 
proposed new form of, 246- 
250; must be fitted into com- 
plete system, 250, 251; how it 
should be used, 251-257; plan 
of, in a Western university, 
251, 252; must be backed by 
administration, 251, 253; driv- 
ing sheep to Omaha, 253; 
results of proper system, 254- 
257; should be standardized, 
like athletics, 255-257; and 
made clear to students, 256; 
attitude of faculty toward, 256, 
257. See Diploma. 

Marks, meaning of, in college, 328, 

332- 
McClure's Magazine, extract from, 

365- 
McKinley, President, 365. 
Medical courses, changes in, 243, 

244. 
Medical schools and lectures, 129, 

131. 132- 
Methods, changes of, in universi- 
ties and colleges, 203-205. 



Index 



407 



Michigan, University of, propor- 
tion of college students in, 8. 

Ministry, falling off in candidates 
for, 91, 92. 

Moralist, point of view of , 144, 145. 

Motto, of reorganized college, 225- 
230; must select one for all in- 
stitutions, 325; importance of 
football, 326; growth of foot- 
ball not accidental, 326, 327; 
football investment of colleges, 
327, 328; "Team work, hard 
work and good work," what 
it means in the world, in foot- 
ball and college, 328-330; 
must be enforced by adminis- 
trative department, 329, 330; 
of college administrative de- 
partment, 297. 

Mouse, story of, 270, 271. 

Municipal corporations, colleges 
are quasi, 36-40; ownership, 
351- 

Names of colleges and universities, 
why not used herein, 11. 

New York City, presidents of in- 
surance companies and banks 
in, 317. 318. 

Nonfraternity, colleges, conditions 
in, 105, 106; members, 105- 
114, 310. 

Nursing, trained, relation to medi- 
cine, 30, 31. 

Oberlin, financial system in, 340. 
Omaha, driving sheep to, 253. 

Panhellenism, 104. 

Parable of the Sower and the Seed, 
66-68. 

Parents, should investigate student- 
life conditions, 121, 122; in- 
terest of, in student life, 158; 
should contribute to adminis- 
tration cost, 304-306; should 
study college home, 352; pow- 
er of, in reorganizing colleges, 

373- 
Park, Professor, 358, 359. 



Peabody, Endicott, 94. 

Pedagogical department, in reor- 
ganized college, 341-347; must 
improve teachers and teaching, 
341, 342; must put premium 
on fine teaching capacity, 342; 
must reward and promote 
good teachers, 342, 343; award 
its own honors, 343, 344; and 
guard star teachers, 344; ped- 
agogy must assert itself, 344, 
345; and learn college motto, 
346, 347. See Pedagogy. 

Pedagogy, college, has abandoned 
many functions, 35, 36; at 
present poor, 23-26; story of 
law student, 23, 24; no coach- 
ing as with fraternities and 
athletics, 24, 25; criticism by 
Flexner, 25; should be pure 
and simple, 29; overdevelop- 
ment of forces of, 149-15 1; 
real position of, 158, 159; does 
not use forms, blanks, prece- 
dents and accounting, 230- 
234; difficulties arising there- 
from, 231-234; responsible for 
the college waste heap, 260— 
265; why it cannot handle col- 
lege administration, 299-303; 
and pedagogical methods, 1 69- 
172. 5ee Colleges, Pedagogical 
Department, Teacher. 

Pennsylvania lines, 189. 

Personal habits, to be reached by 
college homes, 81, 82. 

Phi Beta Kappa, 150. 

Physical culture, how changed, 
280, 281. 

Physical education in college, ob- 
jects of, 83-87. 

Physical examinations, compul- 
sory, 310. 

Power of a man, 88, 89. 

Precedents, use of, 223-227. See 
Blank Forms. 

Preceptorial system at Princeton, 
207. 

Preparatory schools, fraternities in, 
117; vices in, 133. 



4o8 



Index 



President, in the reorganized col- 
lege, executive head, 313; du- 
ties and functions as such, 313- 
321; in earlier colleges, 314; 
how he will help college per- 
form its duty, 316, 317; will 
bring things to pass, 317; 
must be executive rather than 
technical head, 317, 318; ex- 
amples from New York insur- 
ance companies and banks, 
317, 318; must have good cabi- 
net, 318, 319; must regard his 
health, 320; must have no di- 
vided responsibility, 318-321; 
his training and duties, 362, 

Price Usts, uniform, 291. 

Primary unit of reorganized college, 
185-199. 

Princeton, size in 1850, 30; pre- 
ceptorial system at, 207. 

Professions, learned, how they 
have changed, 240-244. 

Public schools, expenditures for, 
53-57; now educate most of 
college students, 55, 56. 

Publicity, bureau of, in the reor- 
ganized college, 280-288; how 
colleges have advertised here- 
tofore, 280, 281; story of re- 
formatory, 281, 282; scope and 
work of, 283-288; will promote 
college economy, 286-288; 
how colleges have avoided, 

286, 287; urged upon colleges, 

287, 288; duties of, 358. 

Railroads, early turnpike, 38, 39; 
how chartered and consoli- 
dated, 38-40; enforce total ab- 
stinence, 134; growth of ad- 
ministrative departments of, 
206; construction foremen of, 
206, 207; accounts and an- 
nual reports of, 227-234, 263- 
265; how standardized, 289, 
290. 

Records, use of, in athletics, 225, 
226. 



Recreation, important in college 
athletics, 85, 86. 

Reformatory, atmosphere of, how 
changed, 281, 282. 

Reserve funds, 188-194. 

Reorganization, of colleges, from 
what standpoint to be consid- 
ered, 3, 4; on usual Hnes of 
business and corporate af- 
fairs, 4, 5; complicated by 
high schools and technical 
schools, 9; need of, admitted, 
12; needed because of failure 
to organize and coordinate all 
departments, 13; demanded, 
140, 142-145; what it implies, 
363; first essential of, 185, 186; 
teacher, primary unit, 186, 
187; must follow factory prac- 
tice, 187, 188; importance of 
keeping plant in order, 188- 
192; sinking, depreciation and 
other reserve funds, 189, 194; 
how plant to be conserved, 
190-192; overtaxing teachers, 
190-194; increase of students, 
191, 192; decrease of average 
income, 192, 193; strain on 
faculty, 190-194; disadvan- 
tages of college professors, 196- 
199; must use blank forms and 
precedents, 223-234; studyand 
care of college plant, 235-239; 
must study college field, 240- 
244; studying the college 
waste heap, 258-265; exam- 
inations, 266-269; discipUne, 
270-274; waiting Ust, 275- 
279; advertising and pubhcity, 
280-288; standardization and 
uniformity, 289-296; further 
suggestions as to administra- 
tive department, 297-306; re- 
lation of administration to 
student life, 307-312; the 
president, 313-321; motto and 
ideal, 325-330; resume; key- 
note of, 331-366. 5ec Colleges. 

Reorganizer, point of view of, 139, 
140, 144, 145, 



Index 



409 



Rivalry between and within insti- 
tutions, how promoted, 255. 

Scholarliness, its meaning, 150, 

151. 157-162. 
Scholarship, what it means, 149, 150, 

157-162. See Marking System. 
Schurman, President, 107. 
Sciences, how to be studied, 178, 

179. _ _ 
Sheep, driving, to Omaha, 253. 
Single-entry bookkeeping, 215-222. 
Sleeping sickness, 167. 
Social evil. See College Vices. 
Soft culture courses, 251, 328, 334- 

337- 

Sower and the Seed, Parable of, 
66-68. 

Standard Oil Company, illustra- 
tions from, 172, 213, 258. 

Standardization, of athletic rules 
and records, 255; of railroad 
gauge, 289; and other equip- 
ment and methods, 289-291; 
uniform price list and mechan- 
ical details, good effects there- 
of, 291, 292; evil effects from 
lack of, in colleges, 292; lack 
of, in colleges illustrated, 292- 
294; how brought about, 294- 
296. See Uniformity. 

State, relation of the college to, 51- 
60; dutiesof college toward, 89, 
140-145; cannot assume col- 
lege functions, 143; conditions 
in ideal, 147, 148; colleges 
should train citizens of, 148, 
149; embryo citizens of, 154, 
155; citizenship great object 
of college, 157; leaders are 
from college graduates, 161; 
improved conditions from 
standardization in colleges, 
294-296; rights of, as to ped- 
agogical department, 302; du- 
ties of college to, kept in view 
by president, 313-321. See 
Citizen, Student Government. 

State aid to colleges, 55, 295, 354, 
355. 373- 



State universities, growing faster 
than private institutions, 8, 9; 
how cost of administration to 
be paid, 304. 

Statistics, bureau of, 354, 355. 

Student activities, what are, 64, 65. 
See College Community Life. 

Student citizen, rights of, 274. See 
Citizen, Citizenship. 

Student government, growth of, 50; 
should train for citizenship, 
75-77, 81-83; wrong view of, 
76, 77; can be made success- 
ful, 77, 78; Columbia's experi- 
ment in, 77, 380; Amherst's 
honor system, 78-80; statistics 
as to, 80, 81, See Citizen. 

Student life department, must be 
developed, not carried, 35, 36; 
comprises ninety per cent of 
student's time, 27, 28; value 
of home factors in, 28, 29; 
importance of, 146-162; reme- 
dying evils of, 146; directly af- 
fects future citizenship, 148— 
162; predominance of college 
community and home life 
forces, 149-162; overdevelop- 
ment of college pedagogy, 
community or home life, 149- 
154; scholarliness, 150, 151; 
value in training future citi- 
zen, 151-153; danger of not 
regulating, 153, 154; running 
wild, 155, 156; citizenship, 
156-162; citizenship, chief 
aim of, 156, 157; importance 
of, in eyes of students and 
parents, 158, 159; requires 
good administration, 159, 160; 
college temptations, 160, 161; 
trains leaders, 161, 162; quite 
outside of pure pedagogy, 162 ; 
how misunderstood, 328; is 
dealing with picked young 
men, 348; politics in, 348, 349; 
college should study its own 
problems, 349; duties of fra- 
ternities, 349-352; competi- 
tion in, 350-352; the college 



41 o 



Index 



Student life department — Cont. 
barracks, 350, 351: college 
home-making, 351, 352; func- 
tions of, 351. See Colleges, 
College Community Life, Fra- 
ternities, Intercollegiate Ath- 
letics, Student Government. 

Surety bonds, what required to get, 
138. 

Tabernacle, lecture by college 
president upon, 51, 52. 

Taft, William H., 351. 

Teacher, how must be regarded in 
college, 341-347. See Peda- 
gogical Department, Peda- 
gogy. New primary unit, 185- 
199; is part of college plant, 
186; easily goes stale, 186, 187; 
needs good factory practice, 
187-191; is of primary impor- 
tance, 188-194; how to be 
conserved, 189-194; waste of, 
at present, 191-194; over- 
worked, 190-194; should be 
better rewarded, 193, 194; 
under German system, 194, 
195; in earlier colleges, 195, 
196; assistant, 196, 197; should 
be kept at highest efl&ciency, 
198; direct power of, upon 
student, 359-362 ; teaching, 
what it is, 181, 182. See Ped- 
agogy. 

Team work, hard work and good 
work, 326-330, 339, 346, 347, 
352, 362. 

Technical schools, complicate re- 
organization, 9. 

Temptations of college, 160, 161. 

Theology, changes in, 51, 52. 

Thwing, Charles F., College Ad- 
ministration, 27. 

Trade unions, 301, 302, 345, 346. 

Training for citizenship, how words 
used herein, 73. See Citizen. 

Trustees, board of, duties of, 316, 
363- 

Undesirable citizen, 71-73. 
Uniformity, lack of, complications 



Uniformity — Cont. 

from, 7, 10, II, 2iq, 220; as 
to prevalence of college vices, 
121, 122. 

United States Department of Edu- 
cation, 263-265. 

United States Interstate Commerce 
Commission, 228-234, 263- 
. 265. 

United States Steel Corporation, il- 
lustrations from, 172, 179, 189. 

Units, difiFerent kinds of, under 
single- and double-entry book- 
keeping, 217-222; marking 
system as, 218; colleges must 
find new, 218, 219. 

University, how word is used here- 
in, 10; shifting of center of, 7, 
8; should be leader, 17-19; its 
duties to state, students and 
officers, 18, 19; and college, 
distinction between, 6-8, 377; 
no sympathy between depart- 
ments of, 203 ; has grown in a 
casual way, 203, 204; new 
form of, 367-373. See Col- 
leges. 

Waiting list in the reorganized col- 
lege, 275-279. 

Waste, from lack of administration, 
205; unnecessary, in prepara- 
tory schools, 244. See Col- 
lege Waste Heap. 

Waste pile. See College Waste 
Heap. 

Water Street Mission, 138. 

Wealth and power of colleges, 37. 

Wheelock, President, of Dart- 
mouth, 182, 183. 

Williams, students in, from other 
states, 55, 56. 

Wilson, Woodrow, 115. 

Who's Who in America, i6i. 

Yale, why founded, 45; story of 
James Hadley, 245, 246; ear- 
lier presidents of, 314, 315. 

Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion, 88; connection with col- 
lege home, 93. 



"It is the most sane, just and fair account of our 
university problems in existence." — David Starr 
Jordan, President of Leland Stanford, Jr., University. 

Individual Training 
in Our Colleges 

By CLARENCE F. BIRDSEYE 

Author of "Revised Statutes, Codes and General Laws of New 
York," "Greater New York Charter" " Birdseye's Abbotfs 
Clerks' and Conveyancers^ Assistant " Etc., Etc, 

" Mr. Birdseye has, by an Amherst College education, by close and 
continuous touch with the fraternity system, by standard and accepted 
works in his chosen profession of law, demonstrated beyond cavil, and 
probably beyond competition, his qualifications for the work which he 
has undertaken. " — Herbert L. Bridgman, in the Brooklyn Stan- 
dard-Union. 

" One does not have to agree with all that is said in these 
pages to be impressed with the weight and significance of the 
discussion which they present. They deal with vital, present- 
day problems in the life of our colleges. As I have read the 
advance sheets of the book, the conviction has grown upon me 
that the author is moving toward a very real and far-reaching 
improvement in our college Ufe. I believe the changes which 
are proposed will work mightily for such improvement, and I 
should not be greatly surprised if in some institutions they 
went to the length of a revolution in the standards of the stu- 
dent body. The author's own intimate connection with the 
actual working out of such plans as are proposed gives to what 
he says the touch of actuaUty, and takes it out of the range of 
merely theoretical discussion. I hope the book will be widely 
read." — From the Introduction by Dr. Elmer E. Brown, U. S. 
Commissioner of Education. 

Cloth, 434 pp; 8vo. Price, $1.75 nets ^y mail $1.91. 



THE STANDPOINT AND ITS 
INTEREST 

"This is the first book in which the parent's side of 
college questions has been sympathetically and clearly 
presented." — New York Observer. 

"We have not read a more significant and, as we be- 
lieve, helpful, if not epoch-making publication in many 
a long day." — Chicago Standard. 

"One of the most comprehensive books on education 
that has yet appeared. A twentieth-century work on 
the college." — Baltimore American. 

" The purpose of the author's message — and he has a 
message — is to arouse the faculties, alumni, students and 
patrons of our colleges to the necessity of making the 
institutions in all their courses training schools for 
problem solvers and citizens who shall be forceful and 
resourceful, clean and cultured. We wish that parents 
might know some of the things of which Mr. Birdseye 
tells before giving their boys too much leeway in their 
college careers; we wish also that every young man in- 
tending to enter college might make use of the author's 
friendly and expert advice." — New York Examiner. 

"In a carefully written book of upwards of four hun- 
dred pages, the author has treated the important topic, 
'Individual Training in Our Colleges,' from the view- 
point of a college man who has rendered his verdict 
after more than thirty years of professional life. From 
the foreword to the end of the appendix the book is 
replete with suggestions for the betterment of modern 
methods." — Rochester Chronicle. 



"Concerning the present college system, the author 
does not, as is the case in so many instances, simply de- 
plore certain conditions in a general way, but he points 
out specific failings; faults in the elective system, undue 
weight attached to the examination, mistakes in the 
athletic field, fraternity weaknesses — all these are shown 
in what appears to be a true light. Especially is this 
true of what is said of fraternities, which have perhaps 
received more unjust treatment than any other phase 
of college life, except possibly athletics. Both of these 
questions are fairly and squarely dealt with here. Nor 
is this all. It is easier to show faults than to suggest a 
remedy. Mr. Birdseye does not do this. He points 
out that even the most conscientious student generally 
feels that his responsibility to the alma mater ends at the 
end of four years. Graduates who have retained an 
active interest in college affairs have shown it largely 
by gifts of money, many times not too wisely bestowed. 
The author emphasizes the fact that a personal interest 
would be of more value. His attitude is one that all 
would do well to cultivate, and his book should prove 
equally helpful to students and educators. He is thor- 
oughly practical, and his conclusions are the result of 
experience. His contribution to one of the most im- 
portant questions of the day cannot well be ignored." 
— Boston Universal Leader. 



IMPORTANT AND ILLUMINATIVE 

"It has received the warm approval of many leading 
educators as the most important contribution made in 
the discussion of the constantly recurring question. 



' What Is the Matter With Our Colleges ? ' It will prove 
of absorbing interest and stimulus to graduate and 
undergraduate, to parents and faculty, to high-school 
teachers and students, and to all who are in doubt as 
to the fraternities in college or high school," — New 
Orleans Sunday News. 

" Any student of the American system of higher edu- 
cation will find Mr. Birdseye's treatise not only a labor 
saver, but the only adequate and comprehensive con- 
spectus of the whole system of liberal education in 
America to-day from its beginning, with intelligent ref- 
erence of effect as to causes and a competent analysis 
of reasons for existing conditions." — Brooklyn Standard- 
Union. 

" The book may, indeed, be regarded as a very timely 
remonstrance against the aggrandizement of the college 
as an institution, the enrichment of the great university 
by buildings, and external improvements, when the 
individual student is in a way neglected." — Columbus 
Journal. 

DEALS WITH THE COLLEGE 
HOME LIFE 

"Mr. Birdseye undertakes to present the student's 
side of the problem, considering the undergraduate as 
an individual. To make his study effective, the author 
undertakes to enter the student's college home life. He 
searches diligently for facts and deals frankly and 
candidly with the facts as he finds them." — Review 0} 
Reviews. 



"His discussion of the student's home life as distin- 
guished from the college community life, is entirely 
novel and unlocks many mysteries as to failures in col- 
lege, appealing most directly to those parents who have 
disregarded this four-year period of their son's home 
life." — Albany Argus. 

"An inspiration, for the present volume furnishes 
positive proof of the soundness of the advanced position 
of those who charge our system of collegiate education 
with being out of touch with the present, and fatally 
defective in method and inadequate in result." — Balti- 
more Sun. 

"Mr. Birdseye brings out forcefully the lack of busi- 
ness methods in college management. No one who is 
interested in the subject of education can afford to be 
without this book." — Grand Rapids, Mich., Herald. 

" It is criticism of a sort that colleges should welcome; 
the criticism of the friendly outsider who is not ham- 
pered by traditions or by the problems of expediency." 
— Springfield Republican. 

"A wonderfully illuminative volume in which the 
evils of the present collegiate system are pointed out 
with no unsparing hand, yet with no unkindness, as 
the writer many times declares himself a believer in col- 
legiate training which he would see improved. If the 
eyes of those connected with the colleges can be opened 
to their defects the first step is taken. But the book is 
full of suggestions for future progress," — Columbus 
Journal. 

"He carefully analyzes the Princeton preceptorial 
system." — Chicago Advance. 



COLLEGE OFFICERS APPROVE 
THE BOOK 

"It is a most valuable discussion of a vital issue in 
American education. ... It places the emphasis where 
the emphasis needs to be placed — upon the sort of men 
we are making in our colleges. I cannot too strongly 
commend the reading of this book to every man inter- 
ested in American education." — E. A. Alderman, Presi- 
dent University of Virginia. 

"I have read it thoroughly. It is the most important 
publication within its field in the past ten years. In its 
range, in the thoroughness of its scholarship, and in the 
keenness of its analysis, it is certainly a remarkable 
book." — ^W. E. Chancellor, Superintendent of Public 
Instruction, Washington. 

"It is deeply interesting, full of valuable and much 
rare information. It handles the open questions fairly, 
temperately, and resolutely. Its spirit is cordial and 
eager. And it has suggestions of importance which 
in the main are seen to be arousing and influential." 
— W. W. Stryker, President of Hamilton College. 

"It has suggested many lines of thought to me and 
has brought before me, as no other book has done, the 
central problems of student administration." — E. A. 
Birge, Dean University of Wisconsin. 

" All college men must be deeply indebted for so keen 
and critical a statement of the shifting which has taken 
place in our colleges. Many of us felt it in a sense 
without having analyzed so sharply its origin or seen its 



ultimate outcome. It is perhaps a sad comment on 
college teachers that a man of affairs should have been 
the first to present the picture so clearly." — H. B. 
Ward, Dean University of Nebraska. 

"It contains invaluable suggestions and information 
for administrators of educational foundations and for 
those responsible for fraternity affairs. First of all, 
your own sense of individual responsibility demands 
attention and that with your material arrayed is sure 
to arouse a similar sense of responsibility in others." — 
M. H. Carruth, Vice-President University oj Kansas. 

"You have put your finger directly upon the most 
interesting and important phase of present college life, 
you have emphasized that to which all of us interested 
in college men and in the college as educational institu- 
tions ought to give most careful attention, and you have 
propounded a most desirable 'way out' of some very 
perplexing present conditions." — ^J. H. Canfield, 
Librarian Columbia University. 

" Except the establishment of the preceptorial system 
at Princeton, perhaps the most striking piece of con- 
structive criticism of conditions in our American col- 
leges has come from outside the college itself." — ^F. P. 
Keppel, Secretary oj Columbia University, in the Edu- 
cational Review. 

"It is alleged of my countrymen that, when they 
agree with you on ninety-nine points out of one hundred^ 
they insist upon discussing the one hundredth. This 
has been my method with Mr. Birdseye. Let me con- 



elude with the reverse. His book is a notable and 
timeous contribution which every university man should 
peruse. Indeed, were it discussed in class, with a real 
personality on the platform, it would be an ideal substi- 
tute for oceans of pedagogical slops." — R. M. Wenley, 
Head of Philosophical Department of University 0} 
Michigan, in the Michigan Alumnus. 

"The most important book on education which has 
appeared in the last ten years." — ^The Dial, quoted with 
approval in the Bibliography of Education for 1907, of 
U. S. Bureau of Education. 



MAR 28 190f 



